Film Review: 1917

By Becky Lauer Full disclosure – I have a very limited knowledge of the events of World War I. Personally, I like to do my research before watching historical dramas, otherwise I feel like the kid who didn’t do the reading before class discussion. So, as I waited in the theater for an early screening of the film 1917 by Sam Mendes, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was walking into.  I knew Andrew Scott, Colin Firth, Richard Madden and Benedict Cumberbatch were involved so I trusted the time spent in the theater would be worth it. I expected to…

Summer Blockbusters of Yore: The Twentieth Anniversary of an Overshadowed Trilogy

By Pallavi Yetur Early this year, New York magazine published a feature entitled “We Are Living in the Matrix.” The February 4, 2019 issue included several pieces about the lasting impressions left by The Matrix on everything from the way we think about and engage with the internet, to how it inspired fashion houses to send tiny-lensed sunglasses and billowing leather coats down the runways, to the film’s role in the propulsion of Keanu Reeves to the top of the A-list. The whole editorial undertaking was meant to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the launch of the iconic sci-fi trilogy.…

Scripting an Off-Beat Love

by Amy Boutell
Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, and Richard Linklater at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival

After a whirlwind ten days watching several films a day, attending panels with Oscar-nominees, and developing infatuations during celebrity tributes—I confess a two-hour interview with Robert Redford nearly sent me to the blue velvet fainting couch in the lobby of the Arlington—I forced myself to get dressed up one more time, to put on the black 1930s evening jacket my great-grandmother had worn to the Chicago World’s Fair. Admittedly, I was fashioning myself less for Ethan Hawke than for Julie Delpy, the luminous, brilliant, French feminist goddess my friends and I have been admiring since the 1990s.