FrightFest 2019: Emma Tammi’s ‘The Wind’
The Wind (2018) is a quietly impressive film, an example of genre cinema that shows thoughtfulness and an interest in ideas.
western
Three Stylish British Silent Films by Anthony Asquith and Arthur Robison
While Anthony Asquith’s Shooting Stars and Underground look excellent on Kino Lorber’s digital restoration, Arthur Robison’s The Informer looks most spectacular.
Wild Women, 40 Pricks, and Western Noir: On Barbara Stanwyck
Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns fuses the Western with film noir and provides ample space for Barbara Stanwyck commanding performance of a Western female heroine.
The Coen Brothers Tackle Short Story in Film Again with ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ‘
Not their first foray into bringing the short story form to cinema, the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs affirms, sadly, that in this regard, cinema is the lesser storytelling form.
The Improbability of Communication in ‘The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez’
The inability to communicate truthfully and accurately runs like a red thread through the course of Robert M. Young's western, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.
The Coen Brothers’ ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ Is American Myth in Vignette
In the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, there's something altogether new about having revisionist western ideas filtered through their rich sense of character, black comedy, and their penetrating awareness of humanity's fatal imperfections.
‘The Sisters Brothers’ Blazes a Brilliant — if Twisted — Trail
Jacques Audiard's revisionist Western shines thanks to moral quandaries and John C. Reilly's performance.
When Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Dead Man’ Walks Into Your Mind, He Never Leaves
It's not enough to describe Dead Man as simply an anti-western; it's an iconoclastic deconstruction of late 19th Century American values and mores, many of which remain unabated more than a century later.
‘Coyote Doggirl’ Reveals Unexpected Life Under Familiar Western Terrain
Lisa Hanawalt's work is proof that even a genre as seemingly played-out as the western can reveal a rich landscape if the right hands are holding the reins.
Becoming Douglas Fairbanks: ‘The Half-Breed’
Throughout his career, Fairbanks scrubbed his scripts of racist elements. The Half-Breed is a rare example when racism is foregrounded as a theme.
Gary Cooper Western ‘The Hanging Tree’ Makes Shadow and Light a Shifting Moral Statement
Exteriors and interiors in The Hanging Tree are staged with compositions that layer different elements across their own planes of foreground and background, while interiors parcel dark and light according to the nature of the characters.
Graphic Fiction ‘The Smell of Starving Boys’ Inverts Images and Expectations
Loo Hui Phang emphasizes the nature of image-making from the first panel: an upside landscape as viewed through the inverting lens of the protagonist's camera.