Since the 1960s, film has changed consistently throughout the years to reflect global and american societies, touching on subjects like gender, youth, and other social issues as they mirror the culture prominent at the time of their premiers. Although films can serve as an excellent medium to shed light on social/cultural struggles, they are also…
Author: Ivy Alvarez
Diversity and Flare in Pulp Fiction and Tangerine
It’s a Friday night and a bunch of eighteen to twenty year olds decide they finally want to watch Quentin Tarantino’s cult classic Pulp Fiction. They start the film with their preconceived doubts and get comfortable to sit through the next two and a half hours. It’s a very early Saturday morning, as the film…
Alien: The Mothership
The first few minutes of Ridley Scott’s Alien set the tone for the rest of the film seamlessly. Ominous music echoes in the background, the title appears line by line as they connect to make the letters, and the scene pans slowly through space. There’s no doubt in my mind that Scott’s intentional leisured pace…
Carrie: The Revealing Nature of Female Destruction
Softness and femininity saturate the screen with warmth as the camera pans across each row in the locker room. As some girls get changed, we see other young, confident high school women wearing their nudity like a fresh new outfit–loud and proud. Slowly but surely, we eventually meet our timid and innocent protagonist–miss Carrie White…
A Look Into “A Woman Under the Influence”
To say marriage is difficult and imperfect would be an understatement, especially in the case of Mabel and Nick Longhetti. John Cassavetes’ film that centers around the married couple illustrates the toxicity of unhealthy relationships, and in doing so, reveals the surfacing of mental illness that may very well be an inevitable result of such…
A Bout de Souffle
There’s a common theme amongst the reviews for the pioneer French New Wave film Breathless (“A Bout de Souffle”); it’s erratic nature and immoral characters. On February 8th of 1961, The New York Times published Bosley Crowther’s review of the (then) new film, in which he wrote “…sordid is really a mild word for its…
Divine Secrets
I must have been six years old the first time I sat through a movie called Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. It hadn’t been the first time my mom had slipped it into the DVD player, but my ripe young age paired with my delicate attention span was simply a recipe for innocent disinterest…
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