Blaxploitation Movies and Music Are the Story of the 1970s
Blaxploitation signaled the moment ghetto culture and the Black vernacular hit the American mainstream, paving the way for rap, hip-hop, disco, and modern sports.
Film Feature
A Mind-Opening Preview of Fantasia Film Festival 2024
Our preview of Fantasia Festival 2024 highlights ten films that stimulate viewers’ emotional, cultural, and social intellect.
Godzilla the Union Buster
There’s a bitter irony in how Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, produced by a notorious union-busting production company, is celebrated for its message of collective strength.
Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinematic Melodrama: ‘Victims of Sin’
In Emilio Fernández’s Victims of Sin, a galaxy of important Mexican film and music artists collaborate on a tale of mambo music, martyred mothers, and melodrama.
Retro Monsters and Sexual Politics Dominate These Three Sci-Fi Movies
Sci-fi movies Unknown Terror, The Colossus of New York and Destination Inner Space inject monsters into personal melodrama for masculine redemption.
Two Southern-Fried Slices of Sordid ’60s Hicksploitation Films
Angry old men, sexy strumpets, moonshiners, corrupt sheriffs, and dumb farmhands populate them thar hills in these two low-budget ’60s hicksploitation films.
Familial Neurosis in ‘Never Open That Door’ Film-Noirs
The family is the source of neurosis, and any hint of an allegedly happy ending in these three film-noirs must happen over someone’s dead body.
Exiting the Comma: On Liminality and Redemption in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas
In Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, Travis is adrift, caught in the comma between the liminal ‘Paris’ and the redemptive ‘Texas’, between lost futures and the impermeable present.
Feminine Discontents in ‘Back from the Dead’ and ‘The Other One’
Catherine Turney, a top-drawer writer of classic films about strong women, adapts her supernatural novel The Other One for Back from the Dead.
Chicago Critics Film Festival 2024: The Good, the Unremarkable, and the Dead on Arrival
Axe murder, motor scooter theft, projectile breast milk and more from a week at the Music Box Theatre for the Chicago Critics Film Festival 2024.
Is ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ An Act of Surrender?
After her psychological-horror debut Saint Maud, cinema took Rose Glass’ bright new voice in genre filmmaking and, with Love Lies Bleeding, clipped her wings.
‘Time of the Heathen’ Mixes Atomic Angst with Racial Woes
Time of the Heathen is a nightmarish, hyper-edited, avant-garde freak-out as atomic angst and racial woes wend their way toward Shakespearean tragedy.