Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963) revolves around the fissures and overlaps between several artistic forms: Homer’s The Odyssey and its fictional filmic adaptation, Alberto Moravia’s 1954 source novel, and finally Contempt itself, incorporating all of the above. Rather than making gestures to enforce the suspension of disbelief, Godard’s film foregrounds its role in this complicated dialectical network; specifically, it announces itself immediately and loudly as an object of cinema. The film’s opening minutes feature a voice-over narrator reading the cast and crew credits, and a shot of a tracking shot of Francesca (Giorgia Moll). This opening resists the pact of fictional film, which strives for the importance of “building false reality.” Contempt declares itself outright as a combination of dialectical strategies wherein cinema is the central method (or, quite literally, the lens). The opening sequence concludes with a reading of André Bazin’s quote, “Cinema shows us a world…

Excluding Jesu/Sun Kil Moon (2016), Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood is Sun Kil Moon’s eighth studio album. When it comes to singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek’s extraordinarily prolific output, much of the recent critical discourse has been unfortunately truncated. Many reviews discuss this musician’s career as if it began in 2014 with the popularly lauded Sun Kil Moon record Benji. As a long-time fan and grossly inexperienced music critic, I intend in my own way to discuss this sprawling, ambitious and ferocious new record within the context of his whole oeuvre. Indeed, when reviewing a recent Kozelek record, it’s difficult to avoid my impulse for personal and anecdotal disclosure. When I was in my late teens, a friend gave me a copy of Down Colorful Hill, the 1992 debut record by Kozelek’s first band, Red House Painters. I was immediately taken by the album’s distinct…

In 2017, the Halloween franchise remains relevant for a number of reasons. This October, Rob Zombie’s divisive remake turns 10 years old, and David Gordon Green was recently announced as the director of a reboot to be produced by Jason Blum and the original mastermind himself, John Carpenter. With this news in mind, horror enthusiasts Mike Thorn and A.M. (Anya) Novak decided to have a talk about the previous entries in the series.

Mike: Anya, I’m really intrigued by your appreciation of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995). That’s a film that I didn’t connect with on a first viewing, but found strangely fascinating on a second watch. Could you say a little more about this commonly dismissed sequel?

Anya: I get a lot of flack for enjoying this film, but I don’t care. For me, it’s a fun departure from the usual Myers narrative. I found the Cult…

Wes Craven’s decades-long career is often correlated with a trifecta of tent-pole achievements. First came The Last House on the Left (1972), a customarily described “exploitation” film inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960). Next, Craven revolutionized the horror genre with his surrealist slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), a tonally adventurous work that evokes the likes of Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau. Finally, the director upended conventions with the postmodern Scream (1996), whose credit is owed in no small part to Kevin Williamson’s extraordinarily reflexive and meta-cinematic script. Some might also attribute The Hills Have Eyes (1977) with the status of “classic” genre fare, although it owes a large part of its style and sensibility to Tobe Hooper’s masterful The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

This characterizing of Craven’s career is problematic, not because it’s “untrue,” but because it’s woefully incomplete. Out of the three films listed above…

Assessed on its own terms, Martin Scorsese’s Silence is a daunting piece. Released after about 25 years of staggered development, it might reasonably be considered the most “definitive” title in its director’s oeuvre. That is, seeing as it incorporates so many of the auteur’s career-long questions regarding Christianity, violence and self, the film plays like a cumulative statement. Indeed, it’s worth contextualizing its lofty philosophical and formal concepts alongside previous Scorsese films. There are a number of ways to approach this strategy. In “Holy Men, Holy Losers: Scorsese, Silence and the Mystery of Faith,” Bilge Ebiri has already written insightfully on the movie’s connections to its auteur’s most openly faith-based works, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997); additionally, Scorsese himself has alluded in interviews to its connections with Bringing Out the Dead (1999). These points of reference are key, and it is also worth reflecting on Silence both…

Two years before Martin Scorsese cast Nick Nolte as the protagonist of his ambitious Cape Fear remake, he chose the actor for the leading role in Life Lessons (the director’s 40-minute contribution to the 1989 anthology film New York Stories). The first in a trio of featurettes rounded out by Francis Ford Coppola’s Life without Zoe and Woody Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks, Life Lessons finds within Nolte the capacity for reinterpreting a stock character. Scorsese would later challenge the actor to apply a similar process of reinvention in Cape Fear (1991), which the director reportedly wrote off initially in a conversation with his friend Steven Spielberg. At first, Scorsese claimed that he couldn’t expand on the Manichean morality of the 1962 original. Upon Spielberg’s argument that Scorsese could easily shape the project to satisfy his own vision, however, the director reinterpreted Cape Fear’s straightforward ethics, and called Nolte to drastically…