Retro Review by Clément Hossaert
The Alien and No-Face chillingly epitomize the absolute black void of a cultureless environment. They represent not only the void of space, and the existential dread of our ultimate comeuppance, but the fact that this hopeless and infinite void is actually looking back at us with a judging glare.
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Jeff Bridges stars in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream
Retro Review by Nadine Smith
Tucker is not about the real Tucker or even the product he made, but about the image he made and sold of himself, his car, and a certain post-war way of life. That’s what any car dealer or filmmaker sells us: aspirations, ideals, and the possibility of independence. In Tucker, the image that Coppola sells us of himself is identical to Preston Tucker, and I'd argue that Coppola used that image in order to build a case for himself.
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Takashi Shimura in Ikiru
Review by Zach Dennis
In a vast counter to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which was released two years before, Ikiru posses an exuberant amount of empathy for a two and a half hour film. This empathy seems fixated in a sort of lexicon — more of an indictment on ourselves than on the characters.
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Retro Review by Jessica Carr
Whether you view it simply as a necessity needed to live or as something to truly be treasured, we are all connected by food. That’s why it was a work of genius in 1985 for Juzo Itami to create a Japanese film that uses food as a way to meditate on human behavior.
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Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey
Retro Review by Zach Dennis
Perfection is something unattainable and merely idealistic, but there is something truly absolute about 2001, a transcendence of purity. Its curious yet forthright, audacious yet small, fearsome yet gentle. The contradictions fit its creator, again, a man filled with self-assurance of his craft but anxious of his role in daily discourse.
This is what’s to love about it. Nothing is perfect, but nothing is 2001 either.
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Crista Alfaiate and Dinarte Branco star in director Miguel Gomes's Arabian Nights
Retro Review by Michael O’Malley
It’s this conflict--between the impulse to comment on real events and the fundamental unreality of movies--that’s at the heart of Miguel Gomes’s 2015 three-volume feature, Arabian Nights (As Mil e uma Noites, in its original Portuguese).
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Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone in Creed
RReview by Zach Dennis
The revolutionary part of Creed is that it exposes the haunting nature of society’s expectations for men, and opens a dialogue of what that means, rather than doing anything to “solve” or “fix” it. Manhood is no longer measured by strength and power, rather, it requires a degree of vulnerability never exhibited by men before in popular culture.
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Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne star in The Quiet Man
Retro Review by Zach Dennis
The Quiet Man seems a little off from some of Ford's more interrogative work — The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and The Searchers — where he took this idea of the American West and challenged it both in its characters and how people perceived this "idyllic past." But this film also doesn't want to — or have to be — like that. The charm is in the intensity of these characters and the fulfillment — and execution — of their various passions.
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Paul Newman (as well as Owen Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy), stars in Pixar's Cars
Retro Review by John McAmis
For the past eleven years, I have gotten a lot of flack for placing Cars in the upper echelon of Pixar’s filmography. Most people don’t like this. But I have only a undying love for this odd, clunky 2006 animated film.
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Vera Farmiga (be still, my heart) and Isabelle Fuhrman star in director Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan
Retro Review by Andrew Swafford
Orphan is of those rare cases where a twist adds a new layer of meaning to a movie without negating what had previously been built.
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Justin Long and Emily Rossum star in director Sam Esmail's feature debut Comet
Retro Review by Paige Taylor
If you're scanning through reviews to see if you want to watch this movie, don't watch it just yet. Now's not a good time. If you want to truly appreciate this movie, wait for a day when your mind is clear.
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Apu in Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar
Review by Zach Dennis
The Apu Trilogy has become so revered because it asks us to grapple with difficult moments in the main character’s life, but also leaves us with emotional touchstones that generate a desire to return to them.
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Personal Essay by John McAmis
It’s a harsh truth, but any human who testifies that they enjoy being alone is lying.
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Emily Watson and Adam Sandler star in director Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love
Personal Essay / Retro Review by Andrew Swafford
Last month, I got engaged--and it has got me thinking about one of my personal favorite love stories.
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Retro Review by John McAmis
Fantastic Planet, set in an odd world where plants gurgle and statues dance, holds a great deal of truth about humans, and we see a version of our own society through giant red eyes.
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King Neptune and his feathered friends star in Vorkapich and Hoffman's Moods of the Sea
Retro Review by Dylan Moore
It is easy to forget or take for granted the effectiveness of a piece of music to inform the editing rhythms of a film...it can feel like background noise, but the swells and crashing of waves in Moods amplified by the music and woven together from fragments of footage gives an active vision of the the sea.
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Kodi Smit-McPhee voices Norman in ParaNorman
Retro Review by Zach Dennis
The plot of ParaNorman seems better suited for 2016 than its actual release in 2012, but that is because it harps on a breath of clarity that is much needed in a world marked by shootings, tyrannical politics, and targeted aggression.
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Robert DeNiro stars in Taxi Driver
Retro Review by Zach Dennis
The trick of Taxi Driver is not in the lengths Travis goes to break from his loneliness, but how it is able to visualize something so absolutely foreign to so many people — the sick mental state.
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Colin Farrell and Gong Li set sail in director Michael Mann's Miami Vice
Retro Review by Nadine Smith
As with so many of the greatest movies, Miami Vice only exists while you’re watching it, like a trick of the light.
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Vithaya Pansringarm and Ryan Gosling star in director Nicholas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives
Retro Review by Andrew Swafford
Refn’s follow up to 2011’s surprise smash hit Drive indulges the filmmaker’s most exploitation-driven power fantasies while challenging them with a sense of justice that makes each violent act truly mean something.
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