Shirkers: A Film 26 Years in the Making
Shirkers was to be a punk-art 1992 movie made by teenagers and their adult mentor, until he spontaneously kidnapped the footage and disappeared. In 2018, Sandi Tan’s film looking back at those events, also named Shirkers, is one of the most idiosyncratic documentaries the year.
Frozen River Film Festival: A Recap
Another fantastic year of the Frozen River Film Festival now under Winona’s belt, Winona State’s Film Studies students share their reviews of some of their favorite and award-winning documentaries from the 2019 festival.
Inside Man: A Spike Lee Joint? Yes, Absolutely
If you look closely, Lee’s Inside Man, starring Denzel Washington, has enough “Spikeisms” to make the film a recognizable and certifiable Spike Lee joint.
Do The Right Thing (1989): Spike Lee’s Controversial and Stylistic Masterpiece
Produced, written and directed by Spike Lee, Do The Right Thing tells the story of a neighborhood filled with bigotry and racial tension that comes to a boiling point on one of the hottest days of the year.
Crooklyn (1994): A Glimpse into Spike Lee’s Childhood
With an incredible soundtrack and a reflective, comic tone, Crooklyn (1994) gives viewers an inside look at Spike Lee’s own childhood, based loosely as it is on his and his siblings’ own experiences growing up in Brooklyn, New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Barry Lyndon and The Shining: Innovating Cinematic Craft
Barry Lyndon (1975) Looking for a new challenge after his most successful stretch of work, Stanley Kubrick turned to adapting the William Makepeace Thackeray 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Funded by Warner Bros. for the second straight film, Kubrick would again...
Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut: Kubrick’s Final Reflection of Humanity
Full Metal Jacket (1987) By the mid-1980s, Kubrick and screenwriter Michael Herr had become fascinated with Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers, a depiction of the Vietnam War through the perspective of a Marine trained to kill. War had been an obsession of...
Killer’s Kiss and The Killing: Establishing Craft Through Conventions of Noir
Killer's Kiss (1955) In the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of the auteur filmmaker had begun to be established by the French New Wave filmmakers. François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard contributed their own work, and they also cited John Ford, Howard...
Paths of Glory and Spartacus: The Stars Begin to Align for Kubrick
Paths of Glory (1957) Fresh off the commercial and critical success of The Killing, Kubrick and his producer James B. Harris brought Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory to United Artists in 1957, who granted them a $1 million budget to adapt the novel into a film of the...
Lolita and Dr. Strangelove: Social Reflection Through Social Satire
Lolita (1962) After completing his large production epic Spartacus in 1960, Stanley Kubrick and producer James B. Harris took on a giant task in its own right: adapting Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita. The adaptation would not be an easy one, as the...
Dirty Harry: The Changing Masculine Ideal of 1970s America
Since their inception, film noirs have provided a running commentary on American masculinity—more specifically, American society’s ideal of masculinity. From The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade and his one-punch knock-out of the effeminate Joel Cairo to Laura’s Mark...
Drive: Eye-Popping Neon-Noir for the 2010s
Drive is a 2011 neo-noir film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling as an unnamed Clint Eastwood-like loner, referred to as the Driver. The Driver doubles as a mechanic at an auto body shop and a Hollywood stunt driver with his business partner...
Nightcrawler: Empathy for the Antihero
The aftermath of postwar paranoia changed how the characteristics of the modern-day protagonist would be developed through empathy for the antihero. Classic noir films would typically implore the audience to identify with an inherently moral, if flawed, protagonist....
Blade Runner 2049: Revisiting the Future
While many aging actors struggle to land the starring roles of their youth and are instead relegated to small cameos or ridiculous B-movie sequels, one actor who has had seemingly little trouble in this area is Harrison Ford. Not only has Ford managed to land new...
Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers: Fidelity and Expansion in Film Adaptation
Adaptation is a contentious term when it comes to translating a beloved piece of literature to the silver screen. Upon an announcement that a certain source material is being adapted into the film medium, devout fans of that particular material begin conjuring their...
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