Intermittently this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. Last week: there are many ways we could plausibly describe Midsommar, one of them being to call it a psychodrama about the […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: combining two things that go together pretty well, all things considered Now You See Me combines the showy world […]
Scholarship is a living, breathing animal. Go back a few years – not that many, maybe not even a full decade – and you’ll find this conventional wisdom about the rise of European “Art Cinema” in the 1950s: Ingmar Bergman, master of the form, burst out fully formed with his 17th and 18th features, The […]
The good people at the Criterion Collection have struck again with the Eclipse line, a series of quick ‘n’ dirty non-special editions of minor works by great directors, beginning this Tuesday with a five-disc exploration of early Ingmar Bergman. Through a very tiny bit of perfectly legal trickery, I was able to pick the box […]
In 2003, Ingmar Bergman, one of the indisputable giants of international cinema, came out of a twenty-year retirement solely to make one final film, Saraband. Nearly two years after its premiere on Swedish television, this film has finally been released to American cinemas. And it proves to be worth the wait, whether two years or […]
