Film
“Billy Ruane built a legacy, and 14 years after his death you can still feel his presence in local clubs. He fermented a scene that still lives on today.”
The best part of the Silver/Ursini book is the padding, the last forty pages in which the two authors go past “Double Indemnity”‘s release to contextualize it within the generic stream of “film noir”.
“Sasquatch Sunset”‘s directors claim they were interested in respecting the universal connection between man and nature, albeit with plenty of humor.
“Hollywood’s Imperial Wars” is at its best as a bold and informative survey of the movies that the studios felt it was “credibly possible” for them to make after Vietnam.
Whatever else 2024 has in store for queer filmmakers and audiences, there’s likely to be nothing else that’ll put a smile on your face quite like “The People’s Joker.”
“Amar Singh Chamkila” doesn’t hit the compelling heights of “Highway” and “Tanasha,” but the director Imtiaz Ali successfully infuses — within the limits of the musical biopic — a buoyant, rebellious spirit.
If “La Chimera” is a bit harder to penetrate than the director-writer’s previous works, it boasts some captivating passages and raises pertinent questions about art, history, globalism, and national identity.
Who would predict that this perfectly calibrated tale would be yanked out of its early 20th century setting and become dystopian science-fiction?
In this dreamworld, the politics don’t matter. It’s the artfully gruesome spectacle that counts — that and the hackneyed Hollywood storyline about the hardened veteran mentoring the neophyte through an initiation into the harsh realities of the profession.
This is a tense morality play, with twists odd enough (and a palette dark enough) to sustain a noir-inflected thriller of almost two hours.
Visual Art Commentary: Silence Is Complicity — Why Museums Must Use Their Voice to Defend Democracy