Author: Landon Palmer
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‘Game Change’ and Recent History According to HBO
There are those on the right who have said that Game Change is a partisan smear. At the same time, some on the left may…
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‘A Separation,’ New Iranian Cinema, and The Epiphany of Truth
In the late 1990s, two quite divergent Iranian films were recognized on the Western stage. During the 1999 Academy Awards, Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven,…
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Culture Warrior: The Oscars Still Matter and Why That’s A Good Thing
For the first time in recent memory, I’m going into Oscar Sunday having no idea who is likely to take home many of the major…
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Culture Warrior: The Importance of Honoring Motion Capture Performances
The performance was so compelling, and the digital handiwork so real, that critics believed it would be a huge oversight if the Academy didn’t find…
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Culture Warrior: The First Oscar-Worthy Same Sex Kiss and The Academy’s Blurry Vision of History
The Oscar montage reel is a genre on its own. It’s transparently demonstrative of the overall function of the Academy Awards. These montage reels summarize…
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Culture Warrior: George Lucas’s Problem of Mass Appeal
A week and a half ago, Anthony Hemingway’s Red Tails was released. On the surface, the film breathes Hollywood oxygen through-and-through. It’s a WWII era…
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Culture Warrior: How the 70s Proved Mass-Marketing Wasn’t the Only Way to Make Movies
As much as I admire the incomparable films made during the era, New Hollywood (the term referring to innovative, risk-taking films made funded by studios…
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Criterion Files #588: Searching for the Political Liberty of Kieslowski’s ‘Blue’ in 2012
One major misconception about Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy is that the films were originally and uniquely conceived as French films, reflecting the…
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Culture Warrior: Scorsese’s ‘Hugo’ and the Death of Celluloid
The self-reflexive practices of the meta-film take various forms. On the one hand, there’s the legacy of cinephilic directors from Brian De Palma to P.…