“I confess. I was charmed.”
Category: Film & TV
[Essay] Floyd Mayweather: The Willing ‘Bastard’ of Boxing — Michael McGinley-Hughes
“His unmarked face, a benefit of his unparalleled defence, became the symbol of the audience’s disdain.”
[Essay] Robert Redford in The Candidate: the Politics of Image and the Image of Politics — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“McKay trades on authenticity, but his campaign is like any other: laboured over with painstaking precision, a machine.”
[Essay] 45 Years: Deciphering Film Quality — Eliza Slawther
“The film causes a strange paradox: it makes for utterly awful viewing that is apparently all a part of the experience.”
[Essay] Making Myth: Purple Rain and The Assassination of Jesse James — Dan Norman
“Purple Rain is a transparent – yet very effective – attempt at creating an origin for its star which its target audience can buy into, exploiting our urge to mythologise public figures.”
[Essay] Pornoentropia — Louis Armand
“The nakedness of the image is always an interstice – something into which the visualization of desire is constantly projected in a type of pornographic monomania.”
[Essay] Adam Sandler: Show Me the Funny — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“The American funnyman is juvenile, even antisocial, but wins over the doubters by way of maddeningly unfunny films that are both mawkishly sentimental and transparently unrealistic.”
[Essay] Jennifer Aniston: Breaking the Typecast — Melissa Roberts
“The cinema is a place of escape, however, we have also constructed it to be a place where some actors are irrevocably trapped within a role we demand them ceaselessly to reprise.”
[Essay] Defining Kubrick — Eliza Slawther
“Kubrick makes sure that, whilst we are afraid of the criminals, we are also profoundly uncomfortable with how the state deals with them on our behalf.”
[Essay] Are you watching closely?: Plot Twists in Con-Artist Cinema — Dan Norman
“Welles pretends to deceive the audience, whilst letting us in on it and allowing us to anticipate the rabbit emerging from the hat.”
[Essay] Rethinking Hitchcock — Dan Norman
“His detractors often criticise him as callous. Yet, these two shots from The 39 Steps show a filmmaker capable of great compassion.”
[Essay] On Rom-Com — Sam Hancock
“For Adorno and Horkheimer, mass culture is what eats us alive, yet we consume it quite freely and unthinkingly.”
[Essay] Nationalism and the National Poet: Shakespeare, Lacan, and the Aphanisis of England — Josh Mcloughlin
“The history plays demonstrate Lacanian aphanisis on a national scale, disclosing the fundamental instability of all nationalisms and exposing the aporia at the heart of Englishness.”
[Essay] Shakespeare on Screen: Adaptation and the Politics of Fidelity — Josh Mcloughlin
“Loncraine’s Richard III resists a critical approach that measures the ‘textual fidelity’ of an adaptation against its literary or historical proximity to Shakespeare’s original.”