Up In the Air
Many of us live in isolation from one another. We commute alone in our own cars, we entertain ourselves with television and computer screens, and shop for…
True Grit (2010)
A bible verse from Proverbs 28:1 sets the stage for this movie, “The wicked man flees although no one pursues him . . .” The tale of…
The Revenant
From our moral failings to the vulnerability of the body, humankind’s fallen condition is brought out in brutal clarity in The Revenant. The horror of our mortal…
Politics, Literature, and Film Book Proposals
Lexington Books’ Politics, Literature, and Film series is actively seeking proposals for academic works that fit the description below: This interdisciplinary series examines the intersection of politics…
Begletsy: Searching for Gold and God
The year is 1907. Revolutionary fervor sweeps Russia, and the most common punishment for political subversives and revolutionaries is exile to Siberia. Those who try to escape…
Sëstry: Two Faces of the “New Russia”
Though not technically a Kazakh film, Kazakh director Gul’shad Omarova’s screenwriting debut, before directing Shıza in 2005, was a 2001 Russian-language road movie called Sëstry (or Sisters),…
Platform: A Ground-Eye View of Uneven Development
Recently I watched Platform 《站台》, the third of Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 full-length films. Following a group of young musicians from the death of Mao through the era…
Absurdistan: Light Magic-Realist Veit Helmer Comedy
Absurdistan is a modern adaptation of a classical Greek comedy, inspired by a Turkish news story from 2001, featuring a Czech leading lady and an East German…
Kavkazskyi Plennik: Bodrov at his Sublime Best
I first watched this film in 2009 when I was taking Russian language classes at Rhode Island College. It was, in fact, the second Sergei Bodrov film…
Ya ne vernus’: Toward a Kazakhstani Lake Kitëzh
The next film on my docket of Kazakh movies was actually a joint venture between Estonian, Finnish, Belorussian, Russian and Kazakhstani studios: the 2014 drama Ya ne…
Shıza: A Very Russian Crime Drama
The first Sergei Bodrov film I ever saw was his delightfully-hammy and gloriously-terrible 2005 historical epic Kóshpendiler, a highly-fictionalized account of the early life and career of…
The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy
The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy. Jonathan Foltz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. What is the novel after the invention of cinema?…
Family, Love, and Tragedy in “The Godfather”
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, was the best-selling book when it was first published and the film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola is rightly considered a masterpiece…