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The Searchers (1956) has been acclaimed not just as one of John Ford’s greatest films, and not just as one of the greatest Westerns, but as one of the greatest films of all time. This praise is all the more surprising given that The Searchers is a profoundly illiberal and even “racist” movie, which means that most fans esteem it grudgingly rather than unreservedly. (more…)
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For years now, readers have been urging me to review Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), which adapts Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel of the same name. I have resisted, because although A Clockwork Orange is often hailed as a classic, I thought it was dumb, distasteful, and highly overrated, so I didn’t want to watch it again. But I had first watched it decades ago. (more…)
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John Ford’s last great film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) enjoys the status of a classic. I find it a deeply flawed, grating, and often ridiculous film that is nonetheless redeemed both by raising intellectually deep issues and by an emotionally powerful ending that seems to come out of nowhere. (more…)
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Director Tony Kaye’s anti-skinhead morality tale American History X (1998) is proof that propaganda is far from an exact science. Just as Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket caused a surge in Marine recruitment, American History X actually increases audience sympathies with neo-Nazi skinheads, despite its best efforts to present them as hateful hypocrites and losers. (more…)
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Dirty Harry (1971) is a compelling neo-noir thriller about San Francisco Police Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), who is increasingly forced to choose between liberal legal norms and bringing a sadistic serial killer known as Scorpio to justice. Once Harry kills Scorpio, the movie ends (more…)
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Dirty Harry (1971), directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood as San Francisco Police Inspector Harry Callahan, is a classic of Right-wing cinema. Dirty Harry was hugely popular with moviegoers, spawning four sequels and a whole genre of films about tough cops whose hands are tied by the system and are forced to go outside the law in order to protect the public.
Dirty Harry articulated the growing reaction to the racial unrest, hippy degeneracy, and liberal mush of the 1960s, (more…)
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David Lynch’s second feature film, The Elephant Man (1980), is one of his finest works. In many ways, The Elephant Man is Lynch’s most conventional “Hollywood” film. (Dune too is a “Hollywood” film, but a failed one.) The cast of The Elephant Man is quite distinguished, including John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Sir John Gielgud, Dame Wendy Hiller, and Anne Bancroft. The film was produced by Mel Brooks, who left his name off so that people would not expect a comedy. (more…)
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I am inaugurating a series on Classics of Right-Wing Cinema with Martin Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece Taxi Driver. For the purposes of this series, what makes a film “Right-wing” is its subject matter, its message, or simply how it resonates with people on the Right, regardless of the filmmaker’s intent. Please feel free to nominate films for this series in the comments below.
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It began with Dylann Roof. (more…)
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Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982) is one of his finest works. Fanny and Alexander runs 312 minutes—more than five hours. Bergman cut it down to a 188-minute version for theatrical release. The full version was shown as a miniseries on Swedish television but was also released in theaters, making it one of the longest theatrical films in history. (more…)
Trevor Lynch
Trevor Lynch: Part Four of the Trilogy
Edited by Greg Johnson
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2020
228 pages
There are three formats for Trevor Lynch: Part Four of the Trilogy: (more…)
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Since my pre-review based on the first trailer of Denis Villeneuve’s much-anticipated and much-postponed Dune got a good discussion going, I decided to do the same with the equally-hyped, equally-postponed Bond movie No Time to Die.
Everybody has a time to die, including James Bond. Bond has cheated death countless times, but this time his number may be up. If so, the death certificate will list COVID-19. (more…)
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Withnail & I (1987) is a masterpiece of British dark-comic satire written and directed by actor, novelist, and screenwriter Bruce Robinson, who went on to write and direct How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989), another strong film in a similar vein. His career seems to have petered out, though, after a couple of flops, Jennifer 8 (1992) and The Rum Diary (2011).
Richard E. Grant made his film debut playing Withnail. (He was also the lead in How to Get Ahead in Advertising.) Paul McGann played Marwood, the “I” in the title. (more…)
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David Lynch’s 1992 movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is his prequel to the Twin Peaks series, which ran on ABC from 1990 to 1991. Fire Walk with Me was a flop with critics and moviegoers, except in Japan. This is unjust, because Fire Walk with Me is a very fine movie. I won’t say it is Lynch’s best work. That praise belongs to Blue Velvet alone. But the music to Fire Walk with Me is composer Angelo Badalamenti’s best work ever. (more…)
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I feel like I grew up in Twin Peaks, the fictional Washington logging town that gave its name to David Lynch’s iconic TV series, which aired on ABC from the spring of 1990 to the spring of 1991. Twin Peaks has one of the best pilots in television history, which was followed by an abbreviated first season of seven episodes. (more…)
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies here
Trevor Lynch
Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies
Foreword by Kevin MacDonald
Edited by Greg Johnson
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012
200 pages
There are three formats for Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies:
Trevor Lynch
Son of Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies
Edited by Greg Johnson
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015
214 pages
There are three formats for Son of Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies:
Trevor Lynch
Return of the Son of Trevor Lynch’s CENSORED Guide to the Movies
Edited by Greg Johnson
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2019
232 pages
There are three formats for Return of the Son of Trevor Lynch’s CENSORED Guide to the Movies:
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If movies can have previews, why can’t movie critics release “pre-reviews”? I ask because September 9th was the release date of the first trailer for the first half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Dune is one of the most-anticipated movies of 2020. Trailers can build up a lot of excitement for a film, but they are immediately forgotten when the movie actually appears. (more…)
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Yukio Mishima’s 1963 novel The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is one of his darkest works. Set in post-War Yokohama, it is the story of Fusako Kuroda, a thirty-three-year-old widow who runs a boutique selling Western luxury goods, and her thirteen-year-old son Noboru Kuroda. (See Alex Graham’s discussion of the novel here.)
Fusako’s world is entirely feminine, bourgeois, modern, and Western. She is also deeply lonely. Then she meets Ryuji Tsukazaki, the second-mate on a steamship. (more…)
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Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite living filmmakers. Tenet is Nolan’s new sci-fi espionage thriller. Tenet is highly imaginative and visually striking, filmed on locations in Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway, and the UK. Its cast includes Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh.
But Tenet is not Nolan’s best work, for two main reasons. (more…)
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Africa Addio (Goodbye Africa) (1966), co-directed, co-edited, and co-authored by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi of Mondo Cane fame, is a must-see red-pill documentary for race-realists. Filmed between 1963 and 1965 in Kenya, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Rwanda, Angola, the Belgian Congo, and South Africa, Africa Addio chronicles the exit of the British and Belgian colonial powers from Africa, as well as the attempts of the Portuguese and South Africa whites to hold on. (more…)
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American Pimp is a 1999 documentary directed by the Hughes Brothers, the half-black, half-Armenian twins who also directed Menace II Society and Dead Presidents. American Pimp has fallen into obscurity and is now hard to find. But it deserves to be better-known, especially among race-realists. American Pimp is just under 90 minutes. It consists primarily of interviews with black pimps and their prostitutes. (more…)
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Storytelling (2001) is the most politically incorrect movie I have ever seen. Indeed, it is so un-PC that it could never have been made today.
Director Todd Solondz is a really sick guy. His films Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, Palindromes, and Life During Wartime can justly be accused of fixating on bullying, rape, pedophilia, abortion, suicide, and murder. (more…)
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Like most Westerners, I got to know Akira Kurosawa through his classic samurai films: Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Kagemusha, and Ran. Thus I was surprised to discover that fully half of his thirty films are actually set in contemporary Japan over the stretch of Kurosawa’s long lifetime (1910–1998). High and Low (1963) is one of the best of these films, along with Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, and Ikiru. (more…)
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When I saw Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, I was convinced that David Lynch is an essentially conservative and religious filmmaker, with a populist and mystical bent. Arguing that thesis was an uphill battle as his work got increasingly dark in the nineties. Many people interpreted Lynch’s portrayals of quirky, salt-of-the-Earth white Americans as parody, his mysticism as arbitrary weirdness, and his depictions of evil and violence as inconsistent with having a conservative and religious moral center. (more…)
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Note: These are notes for a lecture on Fight Club given on October 25, 2000 in an adult education course called “Philosophy on Film.” For a fuller interpretation of Fight Club, see Jef Costello’s “Fight Club as Holy Writ.”
What’s philosophical about Fight Club? Fight Club belongs alongside Network and Pulp Fiction in an End of History film festival, (more…)
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Twelve Monkeys (1995) is Terry Gilliam’s last great movie. It is a masterful work of dystopian science fiction, with a highly imaginative plot, a tight and literate script, fantastic steampunkish sets and props, and compelling performances from Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, and Madeleine Stowe. Gilliam is usually far too ironic and self-conscious to deliver emotionally satisfying work. But in Twelve Monkeys, we see stylistic elements and themes from earlier Gilliam films (more…)
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Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, Network (1976) is a sardonic, dark-comic satire of America at the very moment that its trajectory of decline became apparent (to perceptive eyes, at least).
Network has an outstanding script and incandescent performances, which were duly recognized. Chayefsky won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Peter Finch won the Oscar for Best Actor (more…)
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Gattaca (1997) is a dystopian science fiction movie set sometime in the mid-21st century. Mankind is doing a lot of manned space exploration. Genetic engineering and zygote selection have eliminated major and minor genetic problems, from mental illness to baldness. As a smiling black man who works as a eugenics counselor explains to a pair of prospective parents, the children produced by these techniques “are still you, just the best of you.” (more…)
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In 2010, Christopher Nolan released one of the greatest science fiction films of all time: Inception. Inception is stunningly artful and imaginative, as well as dramatically gripping and emotionally powerful. (See my review here.)
Then, four years later, Nolan released Interstellar, which is almost as good. It may seem silly not to want to “spoil” a film that has been out for six years, but if you haven’t seen it, I want you to see it. (more…)