John Bleasdale Jonathan Glazer has created some of the most unforgettable images in twenty-first-century cinema. From the dreamlike menace of Sexy Beast to the haunting abstractions of Under the Skin and the chilling banality of evil in The Zone of Interest, his films blend surreal intensity with razor-sharp formal control. But Glazer’s world doesn’t stop…
Jonathan Rosenbaum For over half a century, Jonathan Rosenbaum has written about movies with the belief that cinema is a form of literature. He sees certain camera movements as mysterious pleasures to be explored through adventurous prose, rather than mere puzzles to be solved. In Camera Movements That Confound Us, an experimental investigation into a…
John Baxter “Obscene cinema, what a marvel! It’s exhilarating; a discovery. The incredible life of enormous and magnificent organs on the screen. The sperm that leaps. And the life of loving flesh, all the contortions. It’s glorious.” This is how, in 1929, Surrealist poet Paul Eluard described to his wife Gala, the future life partner…
Neil Hornick Foreword by Filippo Ulivieri In 1969, Stanley Kubrick suppressed a book about his films because it dared to touch on their flaws. Kubrick, fresh from the Oscar-winning success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, promised to fight “tooth and nail” to prevent The Magic Eye: The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick going into print. More…
Nathan Réra Translated by Paul Cronin Casualties of War, Brian De Palma’s devastating and brilliant 1989 feature film starring Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox, tells the true story of the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman by a patrol of American soldiers. “When you leave the theatre,” wrote Pauline Kael in her…