Undefended: Top 5 of 2021
Happy New Year! At the end of December, it is customary for the FilmFisher team to compose "Best of the Year" lists. As 2021 comes to a close, our writers selected their favorite new releases…Read On
Articles
The Green Knight: A Christmas Movie?
In the church calendar, the merriment of Christmas is swiftly followed by two more sober feasts: St. Stephen on December 26th, named for the first Christian martyr, and Holy Innocents on December 28th, commemorating the children of Bethlehem who were killed by Herod. After celebrating the birth of the Christ child, we turn around and…Read On
Undefended: Christmas
This Christmas season, FilmFisher's writers picked their favorite Christmas films. The prompt was, of course, interpreted in a wide variety of ways, but as Joshua Gibbs writes in The 25th, "there is a Christmas version of nearly everything: Christmas music, Christmas food, Christmas drink, Christmas dress, Christmas books, Christmas movies, Christmas colors, and Christmas spices... While children are the greatest beneficiaries of Christmas, there are Christmas movies for old people and young people, black people and white people, conservative people and progressive people, smart people and cynical people... If it is a part of life, it is represented somewhere within Christmas culture."…Read On
Craig as Bond: A Retrospective
With No Time to Die out today, Daniel Craig concludes a fifteen year long run playing James Bond, one of the most iconic characters in cinema history. Before the release of the new film, Travis Kyker and Timothy Lawrence revisited Craig's four previous outings as Bond…Read On
Undefended: Needle Drops
It has become increasingly common for films to fill their soundtracks with pop music, though this is often done very poorly. The songs can be too obvious, too on-the-nose, or the soundtrack can become so reliant on them that they lose all impact. Nonetheless, a good needle drop can be immensely satisfying. For this month’s Undefended…Read On
On Yorgos Lanthimos: A Conversation
Over the last ten years, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose credits include The Favourite, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, has persistently carved out a place for himself as one of the most distinctive and peculiar directors working today. In the following conversation, Timothy Lawrence and Joshua Gibbs delve into Lanthimos’ eccentric…Read On
Ten Westerns
Six-shooters and ten-gallon hats, homesteads and horses, frontier towns and Monument Valley – these are the icons of the western, though they do not quite describe its essence. The western is the American mythology, the drama of the frontier: man against nature, yes, but also man against man, trying to master himself through sheer force…Read On
Undefended: Westerns
For this month's Undefended lists, FilmFisher's writers picked their favorite westerns of all time – though of course there was some creative interpretation of what exactly constitutes a western…Read On
On David Cronenberg: A Conversation
No filmmaker balances the visceral and the cerebral quite like David Cronenberg, the director of modern horror classics like The Brood, Videodrome, and The Fly, as well as acclaimed dramas like A History of Violence and A Dangerous Method. Cronenberg is best known as the maestro of gross-out body horror, but his films are driven by their ideas as much as their icky…Read On
Inside A Scene: Unbreakable
The father/son movie is practically a genre unto itself. For heaven’s sake, all of Star Wars could plausibly be described as a story about fathers and sons; even the spin-offs, every one, are rife with surrogate dads. Touching father/son scenes in films are a dime a dozen, and because I am a total sap, I…Read On
Undefended: Animation
For this month's Undefended lists, FilmFisher's writers picked the best animated films (not quite the same as "best-animated films") of all time. Chime in with your own selections in the comments!Read On
Undefended: Against Type
For this month's Undefended lists, FilmFisher's writers picked their favorite performances by actors playing against type. Feel free to chime in with your own picks in the comments section!Read On
Fantasia: An Easter Meditation
"They that sow in tears shall reap in joy." The closing sequence of Fantasia (1940), Walt Disney’s daringly conceived “concert feature,” may be the zenith of the studio’s animated output. In what the film’s narrator describes as “the struggle between the profane and the sacred,” the grotesque, hellish revels of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” give way to the majestic solemnity and quiet holiness of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.”…Read On
Undefended: Faith on Film
In the spirit of Holy Week, FilmFisher's writers were asked to select the best depictions of faith on film. Chime in with your own selections in the comments!Read On
Wonder Woman and the Bronze Serpent
Richard Donner, who became the grandfather of contemporary superhero cinema with 1978’s Superman, lamented in a recent interview, “There are so many people that make superheroes so cynical, it’s depressing. When they’re dark and bleak and angry with themselves and the world, I don’t find it entertaining. I think there’s enough reality going on for…Read On
Love in the Galaxy Far, Far Away
In Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont mounts a remarkably probing investigation into the origins of our modern notions of romance. His startling thesis: for the last thousand years, the overwhelming majority of poetry and literature in the west has glorified passionate love – which is necessarily unhappy – over and against marriage…Read On
The Spirit of Star Wars
From time to time, I will scroll past blog posts with sweeping titles like, “The Mandalorian is the Best Star Wars Since the Original Trilogy”. These articles will often rely on the rather dramatic claim that The Mandalorian captures some esoteric “spirit of Star Wars” which is, apparently, possessed by less than one third of…Read On
Undefended: Cities and Towns
Every now and then, people will say that such and such a city or town "becomes a character" in such and such a film. Usually, this means the locale is depicted in a particularly vivid way or has an especially striking bearing on the plot or atmosphere of the film. For this month's Undefended, FilmFisher's writers picked the five best cinematic depictions of cities and towns onscreen…Read On
Undefended: The Five Best Films You’ve Seen All Year
At the end of December, it is customary for FilmFisher's writers to assemble "best of the year" Undefended lists. However, given the relative deficit of new releases in 2020, FilmFisher's writers picked the 5 best films they saw all year, regardless of release date…Read On
Season’s Greetings from Fargo, North Dakota
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, I made my way through Fargo – not the Coens’ 1996 opus, but the television series it later spawned. Though Joel and Ethan themselves have no creative involvement in the series, and the idea of spinning a beloved film off into a TV show sounds like a dreadful, creatively…Read On