Tag: Art and Film

Film & Television

Art and Film: Men of wealth and taste

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Charles Willeford � Guthrie-esque hobo, World War II hero, pulp-fiction genius � was one of the best crime writers of his generation, influential yet under-appreciated. Among his many books, Cockfighter became a cult-classic film starring Warren Oates, Miami Blues a quirky eighties jaunt with Alec […]

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Art and Film: Claustrophobia

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / People in lockdown on account of a pervasive but invisible biological enemy might be perversely drawn to movies broadly about pandemics, like Steven Soderbergh�s coolly wise Contagion (2011), Alfonso Cuar�n�s elegantly melancholy Children of Men (2006), or the rather silly but occasionally unnerving Outbreak (1995). […]

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Art and Film: Dimitri de Clercq�s dark idyll

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Not every filmmaker can emulate Alfred Hitchcock and cue Chet Baker in a feature debut shot on a shoestring budget and avoid appearing shamelessly trite or derivative, but Belgian director and co-writer Dimitri de Clercq pulls it off with his captivatingly twisted, noirish romance You […]

Film & Television

Art and Film: 2019 Top Ten

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / It�s been a fine year for movies, their demise due to streaming having been greatly exaggerated notwithstanding awkward episodes like the theatrical release of Netflix-backed The Irishman. Here is my inexorably subjective and eminently debatable list of the Top Ten dramatic films of 2019. The Irishman. […]

Film & Television

Art and Film: Rogue plant

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The political ascent of Donald Trump and others like him has produced a glut of ominous allegories, and Austrian director Jessica Hausner�s mesmerizing film Little Joe may be the richest yet. With an unabashed nod to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (all three versions), the […]

Film & Television

Art and Film: Joker is the wrong movie

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Joker, Todd Phillips� tensely anticipated origin story of the Batman villain that grossed $96 million in its first weekend, self-consciously presents as Taxi Driver meets The King of Comedy, and a kind of atavistic essay on the perils of inequality and the dominance of the one percent. […]

Film & Television

Art and Film: Issa L�pez�s fierce children

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Mike Kelley, the late conceptual artist, famously cast stuffed animals both as children�s escape hatches from worldly nastiness and as the potential tools of their nefarious seducers or demons. Writer-director Issa L�pez maintains this duality in Tigers Are Not Afraid, a film of stunning inventiveness, brutality, […]

Film & Television

Art and Film: Claire Denis� cosmic noir

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Claire Denis� stupefyingly smart film High Life, the first she has directed in English, starts ahead of its main events, without any set-piece exposition, in and around a barren spacecraft inhabited by a father, his baby daughter, and zippered corpses that used to compose the […]