Spoilers ahead. The internet is an alien place, one whose customs and languages are borderline impenetrable to those who have not internalized them. As someone who was born on the border of the new millennium and has spent his whole life surrounded by video games, social media, television, and other…

The Hollywood studio system was the productive norm in American filmmaking for much of film history’s classical era, starting in the 1920’s and ending in the late-1960’s. The primary motivation for this mode of production was economic; the major studios of the time, many of which still exist today, maximized…

Around the time that Psycho was opening the borders of American genre filmmaking, a similarly seismic event was occurring in Italy. Mario Bava, the godfather of Italian horror and himself more than worthy of an article here, was establishing the giallo genre, a precursor to the…

The most recent column I’ve written here was about Julia Ducournau’s 2021 film Titane, a film that has garnered a lot of hype and that I had high hopes for but ultimately found extremely lacking, both in style and subject. I included the term “fashionable transgression” in the column’s title…

Spoilers for Titane I use this space generally to write about movies I greatly enjoy or find intellectually stimulating in some way. That usually ends up manifesting in writing about genre films, often involving a recurring group of directors that I can’t get lodged out of my brain—Cronenberg, De Palma…

Spoilers for Body Double Brian De Palma is a prior interest of this blog, and is an ongoing interest of myself personally. One of, if not the most polarizing auteur in American film history, his films have rarely found the kind of mainstream critical success of some of his…

My normal routine with these blogs is to perform something of a formal and thematic analysis of a work of art that has grabbed my attention and discussing it in relation to its aesthetic or historic context, with film being the primary interest. Within that broad venture, I’ve found that…

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, based off of the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, is a work representative of a particular place and time within both American and film history. Released in 1973, it came in the aftermath of the most turbulent years…

On January 1st, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with my family, maybe a questionable family viewing selection but it’s a classic so it gets a pass. On January 31st, I closed the loop began by Psycho in unplanned fashion, watching Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, a clear riff on…