Prolific, rambunctious, and one of the true independents of cinema, Robert Altman was the kind of director Hollywood hated. From his 1970 breakthrough M*A*S*H to his final film, the elegiac A Prairie … Continue reading Death of the Expected: The Films of Robert Altman
Batman’s got one of the best rogues galleries going. There’s the coin-flipping Two-Face, the pernicious Penguin, the Riddler, Cat Woman, Poison Ivy, Bane, Mr. Freeze, Killer Croc, and of course … Continue reading BBP! Celebrates Batman @ 75: Jokers Wild!!
Few directors instantly conjure an image of cool aloofness in the way that Jim Jarmusch does. The man, in his dark clothes with his shock of white hair in a … Continue reading Orphans of the Storm: Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive
An escaped mental patient (Suzanne Fletcher) places stones in the mouths of bodies she finds laid out by a roadside accident. A woman translating an ancient Chinese scroll sees her fingertips … Continue reading The Ghost of an Idea: The Films of Sara Driver
Take Blade Runner and draw a line from the 80s replicant noir to the 90s non-consensual machine-induced hallucinations of The Matrix. Somewhere on that line there’s a node, running backwards … Continue reading Haunted Future: The Anime Brilliance of Mamoru Oshii
Just this past June 4th, Chester Nez died. He was the last of the Navajo code talkers, one of twenty-nine heroes during WWII who developed a special code out of … Continue reading A New Hope for the Navajo: Star Wars Strikes Back
There’s no Aunt Jemima. Not a real one anyway. The idea came from a song in old minstrel shows, that homey old aunt often played by a white man in … Continue reading Balms Away: Burt’s Buzz Homes In On An Unlikely Icon
Martin Scorsese got his first exposure to Polish cinema at film school. Its heady stew of Italian neo-realism, French New Wave, and German Expressionism was a quintessential mix of European … Continue reading Marty Picks Polski: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema
Apocalypticism is all the rage, again, as it has been. We just can’t get enough of the world falling apart around us. Maybe cuz there’s a few wee inklings we’re … Continue reading On the Road Warrior with Terry Hayes
Claude Ridder wanted to end it all. Too bad he couldn’t get it right, a bullet fired into his chest merely landing him in hospital, one more botched suicide left to … Continue reading Over and Over: Time-Traveling Classic Je t’aime, je t’aime
Boy do we have it good. For sure, every place, every culture has its struggles, its persecuted communities, its tensions between wealth and poverty and how to mitigate the differences … Continue reading The Cost of Courage: Human Rights Watch Festival 2014
You’re good at one thing, you can do anything, right? Plenty of musicians have figured they could transfer their talents from the concert stage to celluloid. It’s all about charisma, … Continue reading February Faves: Sneydman’s Favourite Musicians in Movies
