Press Play

CANNES 2012: Yousry Nasrallah's AFTER THE BATTLE

Glenn Heath Jr. — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:39:46 GMT

Governments are inherently evil. Commoners are redeemable imbeciles. Academics are clueless do-gooders. These cookie-cutter generalizations about character motivation and social institutions define...

CANNES 2012: Wes Anderson's MOONRISE KINGDOM

Simon Abrams — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:18:34 GMT

Moonrise Kingdom is a great success, both within the context of Wes Anderson's body of work and as a work unto itself. Initially, however, its Wes- Anderson-y-ness is almost off-putting. At the...

VIDEO ESSAY: DIAL K FOR KUROSAWA

Peter Labuza — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:44:34 GMT

The perfect crime, the wrong man, the speeding train, and the surprising MacGuffin. High and Low has all the best elements of a great Alfred Hitchcock film. But it isn’t...

TRAILER MIX: GANGSTER SQUAD

R. Kurt Osenlund — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:55:00 GMT

The trailer for Gangster Squad isn't selling nostalgia so much as retrograde, standard-issue images of masculinity. An account of the L.A. Police Department's fight against the East Coast mob...

CRUEL SUMMER: 1980: THE BLUES BROTHERS

Aaron Aradillas — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:55:00 GMT

In this series, frequent Press Play contributor Aaron Aradillas will analyze a significant movie from each year of the 1980s. First up: The Blues Brothers (1980). According to John Landis,...

GAME OF THRONES RECAP 7: A MAN WITHOUT HONOR

Rowan Kaiser — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:53:22 GMT

What makes for a great Game Of Thrones episode? What stories can it tell that could put it on the rarefied level of, say, HBO’s holy trinity of The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire? I’m...

MAD MEN RECAP 8: DARK SHADOWS

Deborah Lipp — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:12:22 GMT

"I’m thankful that I have everything I want, and that no one else has anything better." Betty can't just be happy. She can't just have what she wants. Having what she wants...

GIRLS RECAP 5: HARD BEING EASY

Sarah D. Bunting — Mon, 14 May 2012 02:55:01 GMT

More like "Hard Writing Consistently." What was that? For four episodes, Girls has stayed on the right side of believable. Not likeable or admirable, necessarily, when it came...

VIDEO ESSAY - Deceptive Surfaces: The Films of Christian Petzold

Kevin B. Lee — Sun, 13 May 2012 13:25:00 GMT

If one wants to call Christian Petzold the most important German filmmaker of the last decade, it’s because his films operate on multiple levels whose complexities lie just beneath a...

VIDEO ESSAY - In Praise of Maya Deren

Kevin B. Lee — Sat, 12 May 2012 01:22:00 GMT

Sunday, April 29, 2012 was the 95th birthday of Maya Deren, the undisputed matron of avant-garde cinema. To commemorate the event, this video looks at Maya Deren’s magnum opus, Meshes of the...

VIDEO ESSAY: Super: A Brief History of Superhero Films

Michael Mirasol — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:02:31 GMT

With the unparalleled box office success of The Avengers, superheroes are back in the spotlight. Most comic book aficionados are delighted with the recognition. But believe it or not, there are those...

VIDEO ESSAY: Depp Shadows: Tim Burton's Cinema

Nelson Carvajal — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:55:06 GMT

“Basically Johnny Depp is playing Tim Burton in all his movies.” – Scott Rudin (Producer of Sleepy Hollow) This ubiquitous quote by Rudin is often the throwaway summation found...

GREY MATTERS: Black Widow Spins Webs Around THE AVENGERS

Ian Grey — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:27:28 GMT

Black Widow is the first hero seen in The Avengers, the latest entry in Joss Whedon's career-long feminist project. She does not immediately display the super powers enjoyed by the other...

VIDEO ESSAY - Utopia Online?

Kevin B. Lee — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:16:58 GMT

Director Sam Green knows a few things about utopia. His Oscar-nominated 2002 film The Weather Underground chronicled the film’s titular radical group’s violent path towards creating an...

AUDIOVISUALCY: How to "Perform" the Video Essay

Matthias Stork — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:30:39 GMT

In “La caméra-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia” , Christian Keathley argues persuasively that the current landscape of video essays, including commercial DVD...

SIMON SAYS: An Interview with Bobcat Goldthwait

Simon Abrams — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:14:06 GMT

When you talk to Bobcat Goldthwait, the American stand-up comic turned Police Academy sideshow attraction and now filmmaker, you see that his demeanor is very similar to the even-handed tone of his...

VIDEO: All the Animals Come Out at Night: WALT DISNEY'S TAXI DRIVER

Matt Zoller Seitz — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:52:49 GMT

Bryan Boyce's brilliant short film "Walt Disney's Taxi Driver" cherry-picks scenes between psychotic cabbie Travis Bickle and his love object Betsy in Taxi Driver, but substitutes...

Sure, You Can Film a Poem: Charles Bukowski's "The Man with the Beautiful Eyes"

Max Winter — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:10:23 GMT

If you're reading this, chances are you don't read poetry too regularly (just a guess). You may even feel slight revulsion towards it, that mysterious, elusive presence in the literary...

VIDEO ESSAY: BLACK SUNDAY: Three Reasons for Criterion Consideration

Robert Nishimura — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:37:49 GMT

Just as people ultimately judge a book by its cover, many of us are quick to judge a film by its trailer. When I was asked to set my sights on Tim Burton's upcoming Dark Shadows, a movie...

TRAILER MIX: RUBY SPARKS

R. Kurt Osenlund — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:55:00 GMT

Trumpeting the long-awaited sophomore effort of Little Miss Sunshine creators Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the trailer for Ruby Sparks tackles that age-old challenge of visualizing the...

MAD MEN RECAP 7: LADY LAZARUS

Deborah Lipp — Mon, 07 May 2012 05:22:35 GMT

But listen to the color of your dreams It is not leaving, it is not leaving. --The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows." In the Season 2 episode of Mad Men called A Night to Remember,...

GIRLS RECAP 4: HANNAH'S DIARY

Sarah D. Bunting — Mon, 07 May 2012 02:55:00 GMT

I hoped the title of this week's episode wouldn't imply what I had a feeling it implied. I hoped we'd just see Hannah writing in her diary, or hear snippets in a...

GAME OF THRONES RECAP 6: THE OLD GODS AND THE NEW

Rowan Kaiser — Mon, 07 May 2012 01:55:00 GMT

Game Of Thrones is getting exciting again. One of the show’s defining features has always been its class system, which boils over in The Old Gods and the New. It’s painful for the...

VIDEO - Motion Studies #34: John Cook's SLOW SUMMER Revisited

Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:59:00 GMT

The Oberhausen International Short Film Festival presents "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the...

GREY MATTERS: The Decline and Fall of April Ludgate

Ian Grey — Fri, 04 May 2012 13:17:40 GMT

I guess it was inevitable, especially when you think about the place of women in TV and the size of the NBC machine. But the worst has come to pass, and April Ludgate, the beyond-deadpan carrier of...