film

The Horror Genre’s Unique Autopsy of Our Times

Terrifying Films Are Feasting Off Real-World Nightmares—And Experiencing a Global Renaissance

The Horror Genre’s Unique Autopsy of Our Times | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

You know it’s been a bad year when making a “Masque of the Red Death” reference this Halloween season seems banal and obvious. What use is there for the genre of horror when the morning’s glance at our news feed can turn into a vicious mental spiral? When the White House seems to have become America’s haunted house? The contagion premise—which has provided uncountable zombie narratives since the 2002 premiere of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later—can seem downright ghoulish in the middle of a global pandemic.

On the other hand, horror …

by W. Scott Poole |

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The Violence That Made Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch a Masterpiece

Once Kicked Out of Hollywood for Fighting, the Filmmaker Used His Troubled Past to Make the Quintessential American Movie

by W.K. Stratton |

Sam Peckinpah was many things: brilliant filmmaker, barroom brawler, womanizer, revisionist custodian of Old West mythology. He was also a compulsive reader. Every day he dipped into a battered Bible …

Is Oakland Too Real for the Oscars?

The Bay Area’s Second City Gave Us the Year’s Surprise Hits—Black Panther, Blindspotting, and Sorry to Bother You—But the Academy Hasn’t Returned the Love

by Joe Mathews |

The best California movie scene of recent vintage is the opening of the 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. A young man and his girlfriend are getting intimate in what …

California Needs Frank Capra to Rewrite Its Story

The Legendary Film Director Knew That the Golden State Isn’t About Rich Moguls, but About the Struggles and Triumphs of Ordinary People

by Joe Mathews |

The California story needs a remake.

Get me Capra!

Frank—legendary director of films including It Happened One Night to It’s a Wonderful Life—has been dead since 1991, you say? No matter! Just …

There Is a Real Bedford Falls—It’s My Upstate New York Town

An Uncanny Physical Resemblance and a Frank Capra Visit Connect Seneca Falls to His Holiday Classic

by Frances T. Barbieri |

Bedford Falls, the town that is the real star of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, is a fictional place. But it closely resembles a real town.

I live there.

The evidence …

How Jewish Was Stanley Kubrick?

The Director of 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut Had the ‘Aura of a Talmudic Scholar’ and Favored Plots Dealing With Cultural Outsiders

by Nathan Abrams |

Many people are surprised to discover that legendary director Stanley Kubrick—whose masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is 50 years old this year—was Jewish. He rarely spoke of it, his films …


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