Film
Schwarzeneggerology
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On Arnold, action cinema & Übermenschlichkeit. « Arnold Schwarzenegger was action cinema’s Adamic man, alternately entering and exiting normal human time. »
On location
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Mission: Impossible and Eurocentric stunts, from Hollywood to Hong Kong. What does an action movie want to be?
How to people a landscape
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On Cyril Schäublin’s Unrueh (2022), cinema & scale. « No other film has so resized me. »
A recipe for word vomit
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On pregnant silences, and how to abort them — via Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and our own manners & morals.
No pity
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The documentary When spring came to Bucha reaches beyond common representations of war and one-dimensional victimhood.
Ballad of a Homburg hat
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On racial metonymy and the art of misidentification. (Meanwhile: has a glass of beer ever been more crisply and deliciously depicted? Has the froth of a European pilsner ever looked so delectable?)
The void that fills the void
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Relics, and the places devoted to their worship, dotted the map of Europe and the Middle East. Saints, like today’s celebrities, were both omnipresent and faraway, once-vulnerable people who became something more than human.