Issue 59 | June 2011
“An exceptional forum to defend freedom of expression”: The 64th Cannes Film Festival
Stepping off the TGV at Cannes-Ville railway station, and onto the Rue Jean-Jaurès early on a Wednesday afternoon, the sentiment becomes palpable. The heaving throng
Billy Wilder, Movie-Maker: Critical Essays on the Films edited by Karen McNally
Critical study of the oeuvre of Billy Wilder is still surprisingly scant almost a decade following his death. Rather than cogent analysis that reaches beyond
The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 by Pamela Robertson Wojcik
In Billy Wilder’s hilariously acid The Fortune Cookie (1966), sports cameraman Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) gets clobbered by football star Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson (Ron
Steven Spielberg: A Biography second edition by Joseph McBride
By 1997, when the first edition of Joseph McBride’s Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published, its author’s previous subjects included Orson Welles, John Ford, Howard
Machine-Age Comedy by Michael North
Comedy is a notoriously slippery subject. Kant called laughter “an affect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing” (1), and theories of
Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema by Barbara Creed
Darwin’s Screens opens with a quote from the man himself: “I was in those days a very great storyteller” (unpaginated). In the following 232 pages,
The Philosophy of the Western edited by Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki
We all have an idea in our head that pops up whenever we think of the Western. Certain characteristics come to mind, such as horses,
Real and Reel: The Education of a Film Obsessive and Critic by Brian McFarlane
Self-identified “filmophile” Brian McFarlane opens his “touch of the memoirs” at age ten, reminiscing about reviewing films he had never seen – something he never
Viridiana
Set in a Franco-era Spain that has made only the barest of concessions to modernism (there are telephones and cars), but remains fully locked down
Bonfire of the Painted Dolls – Bardem and Death of a Cyclist
“In my day, there were too many symbols.” - Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Closas) in Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) Madrid in