It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
Steve McQueen’s superstardom coincided with a moment of taciturnity in film. Around the same time Bullitt was released in 1968, so too were Playtime, Once Upon a Time in the West, Le Samourai and 2001. Before Bullitt, McQueen was very much a star, but a little less than a superstar. He was memorable in both The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, but these were ensemble films more than s…
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Henry James might appear at his most morbid, but one way of thinking about James’s work is the attenuation of cause and effect. Here, a man goes each day to church and lights a candle to the various dead who are no longer in his life, including and most especially Mary Antrim, a woman he was due to marry. There, he sees a younger woman who is lighting …
1 If a French novelist and philosopher believed, John said, that God was chance, John thought chance was God. I wasn’t quite sure of the distinction, but John reckoned so many coincidences that have happened to him must contain a meaning greater than their contingency, and proposed that this was God’s way of talking to him. I think he believed that this was God’s way of talking t…
Never Rarely Sometimes Always possesses ambiguities that can seem prejudicial, others, inferred. Is the boy on the bus, Jason (Theodore Pellerin), a pest? Is this figure the central character Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), and her cousin (Talia Ryder) meet on the way to New York from Pennsylvania, a sleazy guy or a helpful stranger? Could he be both? When Autumn speaks to a health worker at an abortion…