Citizen Dame

The Intersection of Filmdom and Feminism

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'This is Not a War Story' Centralizes Trauma and Hope

. @lhbizness reviews THIS NOT A WAR STORY, now streaming on HBOMax.

This is Not a War Story opens with a young man wandering through the subway in New York, popping more and more pills. He fades gradually, finally slumping over on a subway seat to be discovered by a transit worker. He’s Timothy Reyes, an Iraq War veteran mentored by Will (Sam Adegoke), another veteran working through trauma. Will is taking part in an art project in which veterans make handmade…

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The Marshmallow Apocalypse: Apocalyptic Humor in 'Ghostbusters'

. @lhbizness goes back into the archives to discuss humor in #Ghostbusters

*This is a reprint of a paper I wrote for Ed Guerrero’s “Horror, Sci-fi, and Difference” class during my Master’s degree at NYU. Heavy on the academe, but somehow appropriate to our current moment.* ‘Funny us going out like this: killed by a hundred-foot marshmallow man.’ –Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) in Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (Columbia, 1984). One of the more indelible cinematic images of…

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AFI Fest Review: 'The Power of the Dog'

AFI Fest Review: ‘The Power of the Dog’

It has been more than ten years since Jane Campion directed a feature film and her latest, The Power of the Dog, was worth waiting for. The meticulously crafted adaptation of Thomas Savage’s novel is a searing portrait of masculinity, loneliness, and self-imposed isolation. Set in prohibition-era Montana, The Power of the Dog tells the story of Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his brother…

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Loretta Young Grapples with Trauma in 'The Accused' (Blu-ray Review)

. @lhbizness reviews @KinoLorber's Blu-ray release of THE ACCUSED, a stark depiction of psychological trauma in the aftermath of assault

A small subset of film noir focuses primarily on the experience not of the femme fatale, but the good girl, drawn into a series of lies as a result of her victimization by men in general, and usually one man in particular. The structure of films like The Blue Gardenia show the “good girl gone bad,” getting drunk and partying it up with dangerous men (an “homme fatale”), ultimately leading to…

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AFI Fest Review: 'Tick, tick...Boom!'

AFI Fest Review: ‘Tick, tick…Boom!’

Is suffering required in order for art to be great? This is a question not asked explicitly but flirted with in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut, Tick, tick…Boom! The film opened this year’s AFI Fest in Hollywood to an enthusiastic crowd whose joyful cheers almost made it possible to overlook its many flaws. In 1996, the Broadway musical Rent was the hottest ticket in town. With its rock…

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Gothic Murder Will Out in 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' (Blu-ray Review)

. @lhbizness reviews @KinoLorber's Blu-ray release of the Gothic melodrama THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

Adaptations of Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood are, in themselves, a bit of a mystery. The novel is hardly among Dickens’s best known or most loved works, largely due to the fact that Dickens never finished the book. But The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a brooding, gothic-tinged mystery about familial jealousy, drug addiction, and dark, barely named obsession, and provides an outline on…

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'Titane' Shatters Barriers

. @lhbizness reviews #Titane, Julie Ducournau's fantastic new film

By now many have heard of, if not seen, Titane, writer/director Julie Ducournau’s follow-up to her veterinary school coming-of-age horror Raw. Titane has already walked off with the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is a favorite to receive at least Best International Feature at the Academy Awards. It’s also one of the oddest horror films to come along for some time, focusing on a young woman who has a…

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'Dune' Is a Rare Cinematic Experience

‘Dune’ Is a Rare Cinematic Experience

(L-R) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is the latest and best effort to turn the political sci fi epic into a worthy big screen experience. Frank Herbert’s groundbreaking 1965 novel has proven to be a particularly…

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‘The Last Duel’ Trips Over Its Own Bravado

‘The Last Duel’ Trips Over Its Own Bravado

Adam Driver and Matt Damon star in Ridley Scott’s THE LAST DUEL Warning: This review contains spoilers of both historical events and specific plot points in the film, The Last Duel. It’s impossible to see a trailer or a poster for The Last Duel and not hear the tagline, “The True Story of One Woman Who Defied a Nation.” But that line is a generous description of a film that is, at its core, the…

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'Mass' Directorial Debut Is a Stunning Actors' Showcase

‘Mass’ Directorial Debut Is a Stunning Actors’ Showcase

l-r: Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Reed Birney, and Ann Dowd star in MASS — Courtesy of Bleecker Street On paper, a single location film about four adults sitting down to talk out their feelings about an event half a decade ago may sound more suited for the stage than the screen. But when the four adults are Ann Dowd, Martha Plimpton, Jason Isaacs, and Reed Birney, the result is a tense,…

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'Malignant' Makes Horror Fun Again

‘Malignant’ Makes Horror Fun Again

There is perhaps no way to write a review of James Wan’s off-the-wall horror film Malignant without either being so vague as to be incomprehensible, or spoiling the whole fun mess. But I’m going to try. Annabelle Wallis is Maddie, a young woman living outside Seattle with her husband, Derek (Jake Abel). Derek is murdered and Maddie badly hurt after an intruder breaks into their home, though the…

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'Theater of Blood' Eviscerates the Critics (Blu-ray Review)

‘Theater of Blood’ Eviscerates the Critics (Blu-ray Review)

No one wrote better murders than Shakespeare. In the course of thirty-eight plays, the Bard managed to stab, poison, hang, burn, drown, blind, and mutilate heroes and villains alike; in Titus Andronicus alone, people are buried alive, bled to death, raped, dismembered, and baked into a pie. Deaths by sword and dagger abound, described in lurid detail; blood flows onto the floorboards, and it’s a…

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'The Green Knight' is a Gorgeous, Superficial Chivalric Epic

‘The Green Knight’ is a Gorgeous, Superficial Chivalric Epic

The Green Knight is director David Lowery’s fascinating and somewhat confounding adaptation of the chivalric tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an anonymous 14th-century English poem, possibly written by several people. The poem itself has provided fodder for medieval scholars for some time—including Tolkien—and is a major influence on perceptions of chivalric romance as well as contemporary…

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'Pig' Is a Simple Yet Profound Story of Recognizing the Humanity in One Another

‘Pig’ Is a Simple Yet Profound Story of Recognizing the Humanity in One Another

As concepts go, the idea of Nicolas Cage heading out in search of his stolen truffle pig sounds like a movie filled either with cheeky melodrama or cartoonish violence. Instead, writer/director Michael Sarnoski delivers a simple yet emotional drama that is sure to leave a lasting impact. Cage stars as Rob, an isolated truffle hunter living in the forest outside of Portland. His nameless pig is…

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'Black Widow' Gives a Hero Her Due

‘Black Widow’ Gives a Hero Her Due

Natasha Romanoff’s solo feature may be five or ten years overdue, but what director Cate Shortland has given us in Black Widow is better late than never. Set in 2016, somewhere between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, we catch up with the fugitive Black Widow, on the run from SHIELD after helping Team Cap avoid submitting to the Sokovia Accords. Natasha (Scarlett Johansson)…

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'Too Late' Needs A Bit More Horror, A Bit More Comedy

‘Too Late’ Needs A Bit More Horror, A Bit More Comedy

Early on in Too Late, the audience is alerted to the fact that this is not just any horror-comedy about an undead creature from beyond the cosmos (if you didn’t already get it from the tinny organ music and plasticine head that rolls off a cart at the beginning), but one that directly addresses the cutthroat world of stand-up comedy in an entertaining, somewhat violent fashion. Violet (Alyssa…

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'No Ordinary Life' Turns the Camera on Extraordinary Camerawomen (Tribeca 2021)

‘No Ordinary Life’ Turns the Camera on Extraordinary Camerawomen (Tribeca 2021)

We’ve often discussed the difference between the male and the female gaze on Citizen Dame, but rarely have we addressed what it means to have the cameraperson be a woman. This is one of the questions raised in No Ordinary Life, an extraordinary documentary chronicling five influential news camerawomen working throughout the world, turning their lenses on war, famine, genocide, and occasionally…

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