“These young people are torn between tradition and mechanization, between Islam and alcohol. They are faithful to their beliefs, but idolize modern stars of boxing and cinema.” Feeling stifled by his …
The Film Canon: Lucía (1968)
Alongside Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba (1964), Humberto Solás’ Lucía (1968) was one of the formative texts of the new Cuban cinema established in the wake of Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban Revolution. Whe…
80 Years Later, Frank Capra’s naively idealistic You Can’t Take It With You seems more timely than ever
If Frank Capra’s cherubically bright and sunny screwball comedy You Can’t Take it With You seems hopelessly naive today a full eighty years after its debut, consider that a year to the day after its N…
The Film Canon: Matinee (1993)
By 1960 close to 90% of American households owned a television set. This little bit of trivia plays a significant role in Joe Dante’s period comedy, set in Key West, Florida in October of 1962 when ch…
The Film Canon: The Great Silence (1968)
At first glance there is little to distinguish between Jean-Louis Trintignant’s spaghetti western protagonist ‘Silence’ and Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’. But over the course of Sergio Corbucci’…
Revisiting “The Glory Days”: A Look Back at The Incredibles
For nearly a decade, the film output of Pixar was primarily conceived from the minds of animators already working at the studio like John Lasseter (Toy Story), Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), and Pete …
Film Canon : The Heroic Ones [1970]
There are many Revisionist Westerns and there are many Revisionist chanbara, but there are very few, if any, Revisionist wuxia. While Western and Japanese filmmakers have freely interrogated their nat…