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Medium Cool begins with an out-of-focus image, a dark harbinger of unclarified forces from an apparently chaotic future. When the image centers itself, it reveals not a clear screen but a broken window, not a crystal clarifying the truth but a sudden lurch into an even deeper oblivion shattering it further. A car has run […]
When artist Victor (Bill Gunn) convinces his wife Sara (Seret Scott) to adjourn to an upstate idyll for the summer, he has in mind a pastoral image of personal rejuvenation. While Sara agrees, this form of escape is far different from the hermetic, principled solitude she seeks to work on her summer research while on […]
The center of Alex Cox’s Walker is a ministerial hat and enigmatic gait loosely adorning a void. It walks around, hero and victim of its own self-effacing aura, clearly considering itself both the herald of a new dawn and the scion of a long, unfurling divine edict. “What do you mean tactics?,” it self-certainly intones […]
Richard Fleischer is usually seen as a journeyman director of “tentpole” films, texts designed to hold up the dream cloth over the Hollywood machine, to keep the cinematic mechanism, and us, in partial darkness. He would become a staple of the machine for the muscular but oneiric 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the phantasmagorical Fantastic […]
It’s odd to feel like it needs to be said for a film that was, at its time of release, one of the five highest money earners (unadjusted for inflation) in US Box Office history, but Smokey and the Bandit really is one of the key texts of 1970s American cinema. Released in 1977, this […]
The Mask begins with a quintessential maneuver of the mid-century, an opening address from a man in a suit whose minor-key smirk and mix of self-importance and ease puts him somewhere between expert and huckster. The film conjures a phalanx of mid-century signifiers. A simulacrum of William Castle introduces us to the film’s world, laundering […]
In Shunya Ito’s Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, the titular penitentiary is mental rather than only physical. Its protagonist Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji), mostly called Matsu, is on the run with six other women, all of whom carry the history of institutional oppression on their psyches. The mean-spirited Hide Oba (Kayoko Shiraishi), who oscillates between […]
The title doesn’t suffer any fools. This is a howl of cinematic nothingness, a pitilessly impotent roar. It’s a post-noir stripped to the wiry skeleton: no shadows, an open-air prison that hides things in plain sight. Allen Baron is the shaggiest of auteurs, a ramshackle one-man band who directs and writes a doom and then […]
The protagonist of Terror in a Texas Town is a sturdy, all-American sailor with a gigantic harpoon. He’s a worthwhile man, but the film’s soul is the film’s antagonist. We meet him as he sees himself: as a dark shadow passing over the screen, “death walking around in the shape of a man.” This is […]
Larry Cohen is one of the great cinematic provocateurs, but Bone is one of his few films worthy of being considered genuinely troubling. Cohen’s films are intrepidly amusing and almost always mischievous with their grasp of truth, but Bone, his debut, tilts normality in a subtler, and ultimately, more forceful manner. In the image of […]
