“Preachy” is a word critics, both amateur and professional, throw out like they see the next Woody Allen movie; regularly, with businesslike efficiency, and knowing full well they are dragging themselves to an early grave in the process. We do it all the time, in other words, even though we know it isn’t good for us. There is nothing wrong with a movie with a high opinion of itself, or a low opinion of others, or a point of view it stands proudly and angrily in favor of, as long as its bite matches its bark. I’ll take a sermon any day, as long as that sermon is delivered with all the fire and brimstone a preacher can muster. When it comes to cinema, I’d rather watch a preacher than a lecturer. About the latter, all I can do is pray.
Dear White People has trouble splitting the difference. It certainly aspires to dress up in its finest lecturer’s garb, boasting information, interrogation, and an army of viewpoints on its side. Justin Simien – who directs and writes – exposes the contrast between the pale, cleanly, rigidly formal halls of fictional Winchester University, a vulcanized Ivy League pretender if ever there was one, and the dirty, barely functioning remarks and eyes that leer across those halls. And across the personal identities the halls would feign to make whole. For four African-American students at Winchester, college is a corporeal dress-up process of mental and ideological norms masqueraded by physical ticks, friend choices, extracurricular activities, and self-sacrificing identification gamuts. Who they are, in other words, becomes a process both social and personal of deep double-consciousness, and while some react to that doubled identity with open arms, most find some aspect of their personality left wanting. Continue reading
I cannot, in all honestly, fully denounce any motion picture that is photographed by Roger Deakins, but Unbroken sure puts in its best college try. Even Deakins, evoking mystery and dread in a number of shots, is going through the motions here, and the film’s most endearingly chiaroscuro frames function as little more than pictorial convulsions of superficial beauty, adding absolutely nothing to the texture and tone of a film that doesn’t have much use for Deakins’ insurmountable knack for rendering even the most mundane landscape with all the rugged fantasy and mythical imagination of a storybook. 
It is entirely possible that Big Eyes signals a new phase of Tim Burton’s career. Upon the death rattle of the vaunted “I actually care about my films” phase fifteen years ago, he went on a decade sabbatical in the tar pits. Or the cotton-candy pits, I suppose. Big Eyes is something of a lift-off away from the muck he grew to shill out throughout most of the ’00s, but having removed himself, he has not necessarily set himself on a new course.
Brian De Palma made a career out of sequestering the erogenous zones of Alfred Hitchcock’s high-class gutter-trash and cheekily admitting to and perverting the suspense-maestro’s more titillating habits. He scrubbed Hitch down to the bone, leaving the material wide open for its more adolescent fixations to rush in. He was always accused of lessening Hitch’s provocative exploration of the internal human mind in external camera space. He was accused of turning Hitch into misogynist smut. The complaint holds water; one would not stack Dressed to Kill, or any of De Palma’s films for that matter, up against Vertigo and expect a fair fight.
Another little issue with acquiring films, so 1979 is coming before ’77 and ’78, but with such a life-affirmingly innocent and upbeat film on tap for ’79, I expect you won’t mind…
It ought not be a surprise that the greatest cinematic study of American iconography, both tangible and nebulous, was unearthed by a German. That film is not Kings of the Road, a sort of slantwise proving ground for greater things to come. It was Paris, Texas, a later film by Wim Wenders and a film whose name evokes the sentimental but bristling irony of a slice of Europe in America. Wenders was that slice, always infatuated with American cinematic styles and moods but trapped in the mortal coil of separation from his ideological homeland, with an unforgiving body of water blocking his way to the land that his heart so clearly desired. 
You don’t feel the seasons in many movies. You don’t feel the grip of the seasons on the humans that would threaten the natural locales that beckon those seasons. You don’t feel the weight of temporal weather and the last forbidding gasp of a season’s tectonic force before it fades away having unleashed the heftiest dying breath it could fathom. You do not feel winter, especially. Frequently, the shorthand for the most temperamental of seasons is a lot of pale white, but we seldom see the nebulous majesty and the tactile dampness of a winter that vacillates between elegant and cruel, often both in the same moment. 
I have written before that, more than any other cinematic movement, the French New Wave was a line in the sand. If so, Jean Esutache’s The Mother and the Whore is very likely the only film ever to divide up the line, or to redraw it. Not only that, but it draws on the face of the New Wave mythology by casting the mask most commonly associated with the movement – Jean-Pierre L
Due to ease of access, I’ll be covering 1974 and 1975 before 1973.
Due to ease of access, I’ll be covering 1974 and 1975 before 1973. 
The Long Take 