Tag: film criticism

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Part 1, Part 2

From Siegfried to Triumph of the Will: Impulses of the Avant-Garde

The most distinctive artistic language of pre-revolutionary German cinema is expressionism. Silent films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, dir. Robert Wiene), The Tired Death (1921, dir. Fritz Lang) and Nosferatu (1922, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau), and even earlier, The Student of Prague (1913, dir. Paul Wegener) and Homunculus (1916, dir. Otto Rippert), are striking not only for the fantastical nature of their themes and the macabre nature of their plots, which refer to “black romanticism”, but above all for their overall atmosphere. (more…)

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You can preorder The Best of Trevor Lynch here

Ondrej Mann: What does your pseudonym Trevor Lynch mean? Is there a story behind it?

Trevor Lynch: My first reviews were published with the pen name The Cat Lady. It was a joke. It amused me to imagine Savitri Devi reviewing contemporary films. I was also tired of the lament, which was a cliché even 25 years ago, “What can we do to attract more women to the movement?” (more…)

The rankings of cinema classics are being affected by affirmative action, just like everything else.

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The results of the Sight and Sound poll of the Greatest Films of All Time were announced earlier this month. The prestigious, once-a-decade poll, which has been conducted since 1952, is widely regarded as an arbiter of the canon of cinema. This year’s results bear the unmistakable influence of film-school fads and rabid identity politics.

This year’s list is noticeably more diverse than the previous one. The number of films made by black directors that appear on it increased from one to seven, and the number of films made by women increased from two to eleven. (more…)

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One of the delights of revisiting old movies after many years is finding out that you completely misread or misremembered certain scenes. Early on in the first part of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, we have the entry parades of the national teams. When the French team come by, they drag their flag in the dust – because, or so I assumed decades ago, these robust athletes were utterly disgusted with the new Popular Front government under the hapless Léon Blum (more…)

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Counter-Currents contributor Guillaume Durocher joins Fróði Midjord on the latest episode of the new podcast series, Guide to Kulchur, to discuss Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers, which is based on a novel by renowned science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein and portrays a fascist future society embroiled in a war of extermination against a civilization of intelligent bugs. Both the book and the film reveal political insights that are not often seen in today’s popular culture. The episode is available on both YouTube and Spreaker (see below).

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Bill Niven
Hitler and Film: The Führer’s Hidden Passion
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018

This book is a great companion to Frederic Spotts’ Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. The only shortcoming of Spotts’ book was that it did not discuss Hitler’s interest in film and his involvement in the German film industry. This book does just that. (more…)

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John Boorman’s films are implicitly white, as they address themes that pertain to people of white European descent, whether historical, philosophical, or mythical. For the latter, an example would be the film Excalibur that I recently reviewed. Zardoz is a film that addresses the philosophical. This is another of Boorman’s films that the critic Roger Ebert neither understands nor cares for – and I suspect more the latter, for the film is a biting satire directed at creamy bourgeois Leftists. (more…)

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The Left is a dangerous consortium of perverts and violence-prone shallow thinkers, but it is also an assemblage of the ridiculous. There is something that is just very funny about a mestizo flaunting his illegal status during a television interview who is shocked when he is deported, (more…)

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Jef Costello
The Importance of James Bond & Other Essays
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017

“Where was that stooped and mealy-colored old man I used to call Poppa when the merry-go-round broke down?”[1]

“This guy can’t possibly live up to the song they wrote about him… probably just an accountant named Wallace.”[2] (more…)

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Nowadays, any opinion regarding Batman cannot ignore the prime importance of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy.

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Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here; Part 2 here)

B refers to The Beast of Yucca Flats; S for The Skydivers; and R for Red Zone Cuba.

But Isn’t Griffin Evil?

But isn’t Griffin evil? How can he be enlightened?

Although Walter White and Hank Quinlan are also large men who commit bad deeds and come to similar falls – (more…)

Coleman Francis starring as Griffin in his self-directed Red Zone Cuba

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Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here)

B refers to The Beast of Yucca Flats; S for The Skydivers; and R for Red Zone Cuba.

No Dialogue Necessary: The Vision of Coleman Francis

“Coleman Francis had a vision. A dark vision. With cars.”[1] (more…)