The Helpless Clock: Time-Sense and Time-Feeling in Movie Viewing

By George Toles. “and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” —Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Act 5, Scene 1 In the final scene of Michael Curtiz’s 1950 film, Bright Leaf, the ruthless, defeated protagonist, Brant Royle (Gary Cooper) leaves his home town on […]

Friendship Finding Its Way Home: Jeong Jae-eun on Take Care of My Cat (2001)

By Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo. At the heart of changing relationships may be changing environments. I wanted to portray the moment when people’s desires begin to diverge. I hoped audiences would not overlook the real struggles faced by young people on the threshold of independence.”–Jeong Jae-eun There are films that […]

“Much Better than Reality”: Julian Schnabel on In the Hand of Dante

By Jonathan Monovich. Some people only want to see what they expect to see, but I’m not that kind of person. Josef Von Sternberg was once told his movie didn’t seem very realistic, and he responded, ‘Of course not, it’s much better than reality.’” –Julian Schnabel In the truest sense […]

Channel Academic Publishing Launches as a Scholarly Imprint of BearManor Media

ANNOUNCEMENT: Channel Academic Publishing Launches as a Scholarly Imprint of BearManor Media; Editorial Director, Matthew Sorrento I’m very excited to share that we have launched Channel Academic Publishing, a scholarly imprint of BearManor Media. With Ben Ohmart as publisher, Gary D. Rhodes as Advisory Editor, and yours truly as Editorial […]

Outsider Selections: Cannes 2026

By Ali Moosavi. From erotic poetry to deadpan animation…. Several movies screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival have not been well covered, with more attention on the main competition. Here are ten shown in some of the other sections of the festival. Special Screenings There have been many movies, […]

A Touch of the Poetry: Orson Welles and Badge of Evil

By James Morrison. Every admirer of Welles – that is, every lover of cinema – will find endless fascination in perusing the point of origin of one of his greatest films.” Touch of Evil (1958) starts with the most famous shot in Orson Welles’s work and one of the most […]

Narrative Rigor in the Nightmare Labyrinth of Backrooms

By Andrew Kolarik. Something that has grown organically over the last few years from quiet beginnings rooted in internet memes and computer gaming…and is startlingly effective at evoking a kind of nameless dread…. The weird netherworld of Backrooms might be what Purgatory is like. Endless repetition of places and memories […]

There is No Time: Weird Currents in Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada

By Thomas M. Puhr. Like their traditional method of travel, Nick and Liam’s temporal destination underlines Jenkin’s disinterest in sci-fi spectacle.” Time travel stories naturally conflate space and time. In such narratives, the non-present is like a location—the word “travel” itself suggests physical movement to a place either behind (the past) […]

An Interview with A Useful Ghost: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke

By Yun-hua Chen. I think it comes down to absurdity. I’m not sure it’s exactly a genre, but ‘absurd’ feels closest.” Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke The combination of the seemingly contradictory concepts in the title, useful and ghost, is the film’s most ingenious device. What happens when a ghost obsesses a vacume […]

Cronus Devouring His Children: William Richert’s Winter Kills (1979)

By Robert Guffey. For no matter who eats who first, the grave swallows both father and son in time….” What follows is a brief excerpt from my latest book, Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos (Headpress, 2025). This analysis of William Richert’s Winter Kills […]