Agora (Amenábar, 2009)
Kenneth R. Morefield reviews Agora at 1More Film Blog.
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Bright Star (Campion, 2009)
Jane Campion's Bright Star is a heartfelt, carefully drawn, masterpiece of a love story, It contains all the fire and penetration one would expect from a Campion film, but there is also a surprising--and welcome--tenderness as well.
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Vision (von Trotta, 2009)
Films that depict communal religious life with nuance and sympathy are rare, and those that probe without cliché the relationships, communal and familial, between women are rarer still. So why… Continue reading "Vision (von Trotta, 2009)"
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To Be or Not To Be (Lubitsch, 1942)
The larger point, though, is that Hollywood has participated from the beginning in shaping our attitudes in the service of a political or ideological point of view. The Reader was not the first portrayal of the German people as being beleaguered by Nazism, nor was Quentin Tarantino the first to mine the fascist mindset for Juvenalian satire.
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You’ve Come a (Long?) Way, Baby
Oh, we like to congratulate ourselves in the West (and America in particular) that women have more rights than they did at some indeterminate time in the past or in some repressive culture with which we can compare.
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Screen Door Jesus (Davis, 2003)
Part Short Cuts, part Lone Star, part Saved!, with a pinch of Flannery O'Connor thrown in for good measure, Screen Door Jesus will delight a few, infuriate a few, bore a few, and remain unseen by a multitude.
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Equiano in Africa (Young, 2008)
It is an eleven minute short film with Equiano's text read over images of contemporary life in Benin
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Lake of Fire (Kaye, 2006)
To call Lake of Fire uncompromisingly sober is to call a roundhouse kick to the kidney bracing.
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Inglorious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009)
You should know the resulting film is one where the titular Basterds are not the focus, where two-thirds of the film is subtitled French and German, and where nearly all the scant action scenes already appeared in the trailers. But misleading trailers aside, the resulting film left me stunned. This movie is going to make some people angry and shocked, but Tarantino succeeds in making the movie I never imagined, but maybe actually always wanted. It's an audacious, dizzying, beautiful cinematic fever dream.
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Buffy The Vampire Slayer
The main reason I'm posting about the show, however, is that noted scholar and Buffy enthusiast Elizabeth Rambo has begun a blog project rewatching the show and blogging individual episodes at The Painful Nowning Process. Dr. Rambo is one of the co-editors of Buffy Goes Dark, and she brings a broad foundation of literary knowledge and cultural insight into her writing. If you've ever wanted to try out the show or think more deeply about quality television, consider this a master class with an individual tutor and--here's the best part--no tuition!