Slate’s Dennis Lim on Up in the Air:
The first film in history was an 1895 short by the Lumière brothers with the self-explanatory title Workers Leaving the Factory. In the years since, as if in deference to their function as a leisure activity, movies have been largely blind to the daily rituals of work and [...]

“Wes Anderson doesn’t make movies anymore. He creates overly precious paintings inhabited by emasculated man-children who knit sweater vests to the accompaniment of Belle & Sebastian while fantasizing that they’re macho enough to skin a caribou with a pocketknife.”
Vice, “Criterion’s Little Fuck-Ups.” Saves me the time of hating on some of these flicks/directors myself, and [...]

It’s a long clip (c. 16 minutes), but it’s a doozy. And it starts with a swell vertical tracking shot.
Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) is widely regarded as the first British talkie, and this clip testifies to his genius and self-promotional acumen. Right off the bat, as film was still struggling to develop its own [...]

I plan on giving away within this essay large elements of the plot of this film. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do so before reading this.
Halfway through Inside Man, Madeline White (Jodie Foster), a mysterious go-to woman for those in power who need to get things done quietly and efficiently, enters [...]

In his review of Robert Greenwald’s new film Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices, Salon.com film critic Andrew O’Hehir laments “the way documentary film has become a branch of advocacy journalism.” While O’Hehir proceeded with a mostly positive review of the film, I’d like to take brief issue with his stance on this [...]

I wasn’t a fan of Robert Greenwald’s last major film, Outfoxed, for a variety of reasons, mostly formal. First, it was a technical mess–repeating itself over and over while appearing to be edited by a high-schooler on iMovie. From a content perspective, while the film was well-intentioned, it was preaching a message that should [...]

Claudia Gorbman, in her article “Narrative Film Music”:
“Whatever music is applied to a film segment will do something, will have an effect—just as whatever two words one puts together will produce a meaning different from that of each word separately because the reader/spectator automatically imposes meaning on such combinations.”
I’ll extend Gorbman’s point to encompass general [...]

In the three years I worked as a videographer/editor for a production company, I came to the realization that, especially with short form pieces (at our company, demos for documentaries and commercials) the music used can drastically alter the meaning. After retiring to a career in academia, one of my fields of research has been [...]

Seemingly as a rule, hip-hop documentaries (Scratch and Freestyle excluded) suck. Almost always, they consist of nothing more than poorly shot camcorder footage decorated with outlandishly unnecessary graphics that amount to little more than a promotional vehicle for the artist or label. (Here’s a hint: watch out for “unauthorized” biographies on Netflix–and make sure to [...]