To date, the independent filmmaker Anna Biller has tweeted somewhere in the ...
Tag: Film
Do Images Still Help Us See?
Contrary to what its title might suggest, Hito Steyerl’s latest collection of essays does not explain how to avoid customs charges at dubious borders. Much more ...
Against Cuteness: “Bambi” @90
Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods—which first appeared in English 90 years ago this summer—is now better known as the inspiration for Disney’s charming ...
Burns and Novick, Masters of False Balancing
When Karl Marlantes takes the screen during The Vietnam War, he says ...
Virtual Roundtable on “Get Out”
In the weeks immediately following its release, Jordan Peele’s Get Out quickly established itself as the crossover film ...
If You’re Woke You Dig It: William Melvin Kelley
William Melvin Kelley, the experimental novelist and filmmaker—who mastered and reinvented a kind of midcentury literary style crafted from a colorful …
The Spirit of Black Modernism
When predictions about the 2017 Oscars began to emerge in early 2016, many people placed bets on Nate Parker’s Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury ...
Are You Nobody Too?
Early in 1862, Emily Dickinson began one of her poems with a startling announcement: “I can wade Grief – / Whole Pools of it – / I’m used to that – / But the least push of Joy / Breaks up my feet.” The British filmmaker Terence ...
Blood Brothers: Dracula vs. Nosferatu
Many of the vampires that swarmed the last hundred years of cinema are descended from one of two forefathers: one is a striking, elegant, and even ...
A Tale of Two Artists in ”La La Land”
It isn’t a surprise that Damien Chazelle’s third film, the sunny musical La La Land, would be a portrait of jazz artistry. His 2009 debut ...
16 Books and Movies That Make You Want to Be an Engineer
“Movie science” is often so ludicrous (Armageddon, 2012, The Core) that it gets used as a teaching tool: students are asked to identify the oops! moments in order to learn correct science …
Lin-Manuel Meets “Moana”
Disney’s new animated film, Moana, with songs by Hamilton genius Lin-Manuel Miranda, arrived last weekend to great expectations. Would it keep Disney’s musical franchise afloat? Would it continue ...
On Our Nightstands: November 2016
Here at Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here ...
The Intrusion Artist
By the late ’50s, when he was already widely considered one of France’s finest filmmakers, Robert Bresson would confess in interviews that he hardly ever went to the movies. There was something about ...
A Handmaiden’s Tale
A hit at this year’s Cannes film festival and when it opened in Korea over the summer, The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi) is now in limited release. This stylish and twisty Korean thriller remains true to ...
Mass Incarceration And Its Mystification: A Review Of “The 13th”
When prisoners in Alabama last spring proposed a national strike to protest “prison slavery,” they called out ...
The Rhapsodes of Cinema
A. O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism—released in January of this year, to some fanfare—is a handbook for living by a kind of generalized critical “ideal,” one which combines openness to ...
Wall Street Women on Film
In an early scene in the recent film Equity, senior investment banker Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn) and vice president Erin Manning (Sarah Megan Thomas) are celebrating a deal with clients in an upscale ...
Feminist Auteurs
“Dialogue memorized, scenes recalled: we became our own insular world of reference and repetition. If you didn’t know the films, you didn’t know us.” This is protagonist Carrie Wexler’s description ...
The Best and Worst Roald Dahl Adaptations
Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG opened earlier this month, to mixed reviews and a box office neither big nor friendly. Now seems like a good time to take stock of the various ...