This book chapter analyzes Steven Spielberg’s supposedly anti-war SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1992) as a pro-war, pro-military, and pro-America movie.

This book chapter analyzes the numerous responses to the famous videotape of Los Angeles motorist Rodney King at the hands of the L.A. Police Department.

This essay describes and analyzes the anthology film EROS (2004), which consists of three short films by major directors: Wong Kar-wei, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Antonioni. The focus is on the cinematic depiction of sexuality as it pertains to the national origins of the three shorts: Hong Kong, United States, and Italy.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s EL TOPO set off a trend for midnight movies that brought numerous esoteric films to an insomniac audience. This essay analyzes the surreal movie and its position as an early exemplar of independent cinema exhibited outside the mainstream patterns.

This essay examines the parallels between Frank Capra’s MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and the televised Oliver North hearings 40 years later.

This article examines the theoretical aspects of point of view and narrative voice in CITIZEN KANE’s Thatcher Sequence, with an eye to untangling the thorny aspects of subjectivity in that reticular film. In addition, there are larger implications that pertain to ALL narrative cinema in terms of who or what generates film images and sounds.

This essay explores the use of understated modernist performance tropes in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film BLOW-UP. The filmmaker relies on directorial prerogatives such as camera angles, lighting mise-en-scene, editing. subtle gestures and facial expressions, and other minimalist cinematic techniques to convey meaning and mood — rather than overt…[Read more]

This article investigates the mixed ideology of Vittorio DeSica’s classic neorealist film, BICYCLE THIEVES (1948) from a cinematic and political perspective.

This essay investigates the possibility that APOCALYPSE NOW presents “mixed messages” about the Vietnam War to a divided U.S. audience.

This essay explores the use of architecture in the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni.

This essay analyzes the process of adaptation from Susan Orlean’s book THE ORCHID THIEF to the motion picture ADAPTATION (directed by Spike Jonze)