philms
Is Bond defining a new type of post-war masculinity for Britain?
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Tom Tykwer offers an odd-smelling twist on the Christ-figure.
Clint Eastwood and an elegy to a dying genre, a lost frontier.
A look at the cult classic and its contemporary remake reveals two films with one message.
If a train is heading toward you, ignorance does not lead to bliss.
The Wachowski Brothers’ fear and loathing of the Bush Administration, or, Neo regresses.
The critics lashed Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ two years ago with a frenzy surpassed only by popular enthusiasm for the film. The reasons for the gap go deep—right to the film’s roots in medieval religious art.
Or, Schindler's List in Slapstick
It's just not natural . . .
Sometimes thinking too much is counterproductive.
A spectacular critique or a mere spectacle?
It's not about Dylan. It's about his critics, fans, and colleagues. The question is, did any of them love his music?
The search for an answer makes a monkey of us all.
Or, Why the Revenge of the Spaghetti Western is a Dish Best Served Not Quite So Cold (Or, Was a Spaghetti Western the first postmodern film?)
Continuing a tradition of ‘entertainment’ that began with Gummo.
It's a liberal's nightmare: a whole nation of zombies questing for the American dream.
Despite appearances, it's Foucault’s philosophy that provides the dread that makes this film a horror classic.
For all the violence, what is real here is the skeleton in the closet.
George Clooney and the difference between smartly self-aware and dumbly self-involved.
Copulate. Videotape. Dissemenate. Or, How to Interpret a Film By Only Seeing the Poster.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Labels and the problem of defining the good.
Ciceronian themes permeate a popular family film.
On eighties pop music, intelligence, and analyzing film
Alone in its genre, this film asks the ancient question of being our brothers' keeper in a way we might actually hear and respond to.
A playful Augustinian meditation on the true nature of love and identity
A barbed valentine from a red-state filmmaker on a blue-state subject.
Peter Parker uncovers performance issues in contemporary masculinized science.
Teens, disconnected from a life not in their control, look for a Big Feeling of their own making. Two find it in violence, extending a twisted valentine to a world caught in a trance and ready to be ‘taken out.’
Neither history nor art lesson—this is a media theory about the new medium having the old medium as its content, and the new medium’s overheated reversal into its former self.
Is Mark Wahlberg the real existential detective?
Not just Kerry vs. Bush—for Europeans this film makes the culture wars pop like never before.
Jeff Bridges stars as the Buddha in a film that’s all about enlightenment.
Psychiatrists are the new Inquisition in this horror tale of church dogma and state power.
Science fiction or conspiracy theory? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
A re-view from a new viewer. Perhaps a Prozac nation should pay attention.
Web superhero-dom has its burdens.
Michael Gose takes exception to Mark Conard’s conclusions about Pulp Fiction, suggesting that just as there is no transcendence, there is no transformation—and that Tarantino distorts even the philosophies he espouses.
Should Hemingway have gotten credit for this screenplay?
A Scooby Doo wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Robert Altman presents Hollywood as a metaphor for the real world.
It’s official: the gunpoint conversion movie is now its own genre. And while it feels new, it comes from one of the oldest and most revered traditions of our storytelling species.
Tarantino finishes his therapy session by showing Uma what it means to be a natural woman. And, this time, it’s a Western!
The Letter of Hellboy to the Galatians.
The thieves aren’t the bad guys. The media is. Or are they? Let’s name names.
On being a tour through the history of philosophy.
Celebrity stalkers are only being honest.
Share the pain as Adam Sandler—er, Barry Egan—tries to figure out what it is to be a man.
If faith is the evidence of things unseen, then what’s a movie? Or, why the Pope said what he allegedly did.
Postmodern multimedia attacks Tokyo—and our senses and sensibilities.
These days it’s sometimes hard to talk seriously about the ethics of sex. That’s where the Alien movies come in. Of course, with four directors, figuring out what they’ve got to say is another story.
The real victim is the feminist movement.
Three alternative endings provide explanations of the top theories for the JFK assassination.
The documentary version of Seinfeld. With a small difference.
Searching for something filling in a world of fabrication.
A father and son struggle to reunify word and reality, signifier and signified.
Tom Cruise follows the Twelve Step path to freedom from alcohol—and Western Civ.
Clint Eastwood directs a mythic narrative of a person who kills off his own id.
Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is a completely original inversion of A Christmas Carol.
Fight Club is a smart new twist on the most famous of the Greek tragedies. Jack is a modern-day Oedipus and Tyler Durden is his father, Laius.
Tarantino revisits his childhood and produces a postmodern, gender- and genre-bending psychotherapy session in an attempt to remake the past.
It’s not a story. It’s not a philosophy. It’s a global marketing experiment that’s all about control. And George Orwell saw it coming.
Perhaps no anime has destroyed Tokyo so artfully as this film, which captures the horror and the appeal of the apocalypse.
Gaspard Noé has produced an unwatchable film about how we watch films.
Disney does a knockoff of Shakespeare and gives Hamlet a happy ending.
John Cusack is the front-man for an unsettling primer on the dos and don’ts of postmodern psychology. Jacques Lacan is ba-ack—and he has an important message about looking for certainty where it doesn’t exist.
The death of God and the Royale with Cheese.
Why Bob Dylan won’t lend a hand and is still standing in the middle of the road (and how Ozzy Osbourne is the future).
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
John Connor marries his mother, Ahnold grows impotent, the T-X as dominatrix, and other Freudian themes.
The Animatrix is The Prince for the electronic age.
This horror classic drifts between the darkness of irrational instinct and the light of common sense, whether 1940s Europe vs. America or the girl next door vs. the femme fatale.
The Brothers Wachowski are attempting the reunification of the mythologies of East and West. And other reasons the One is an anomaly.
The Matrix: Reloaded, Re-Decoded
Metaphilm's theologian in virtual residence takes another crack at interpreting Reloaded. Can you free your mind if the Matrix is really your own desire for salvation?
Nietzsche’s Abyss is staring back at you and grinning with real gold teeth, implanted on actors for the sacred end of Authenticity.
A guy who keeps his cool in the fight against rage, “Jim” takes his place as the best hero of the summer, the one we’d really like to be.
The tragedy of The Matrix Reloaded is not only that it abandons the savior motif it so obviously advertised in the first film for a bait and switch, but also that the product delivered in the sequel is not even good old Hinduism or Buddhism—or even relativism for that matter—but a vapid and reheated heresy packaged in a smart business suit and sold at a price in a hotel conference room.
Sweet Home Alabama is Breakfast at Tiffany’s with a happy ending—and a slap in the face to DeBeers.
The Coen Brothers turn to Camus for help telling the story of modern alienation.
Kubrick confounds the critics—and their critics—with a best-of-breed film. The trick is figuring out the breed. A Metaphilm exclusive.
Marvel Morality and the Once and Future King. Magneto has a lesson about evolutionary geopolitics to share with the would-be leaders of the world.
Maybe it is all about the frogs. A master prestidigitator tells the story of the children in bondage, with child genius Stanley Spector playing Moses.
Blade Runner meets Memento in a film about the memories of love.
One man’s struggle to support a family on one income in an economy that’s moved beyond his worldview.
The new James Bond for the Maxim era sets off the decline and fall of the American Empire. Now playing at a political theater near you.
Hugh Grant stars as the last hero of the dot-com era, the Sun-Tzu of Nothing, the one who lived the Seinfeldian Dream. Can the dot-commers join the grown-up world?
The only movie made about a book you can't read, or, How to Read a Film as Text and Back Again
A country in post-9/11 crisis faces its family and friends.
Charlie Kaufman fights self-reference with paradox in an effort to escape his own screenplay.
Is chocolate the means of grace or damnation? Probably.
Consumerism is a plot—and Josie knows who’s behind it.
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
Were the backup singers of Motown’s glory days just interchangeable parts or assembly line workers?
Eminem stars as Jesus Christ, King of the Jews, in a movie that’s all about being righteous.
McDonald’s, Budweiser, the Gap, oh my! Step out of the woods and into the light.
Nike's angry chicken chases the pretentious art snob, but criticism survives for another day.
Terry Gilliam’s introduction to Heidegger’s Being and Time starring Bruce Willis as the prophet of authenticity.
Amélie discovers the magic of Marketing and becomes a product. Don't you just want to consume her?
Hollywood saves us from the neo-Nazis. Don’t you feel better now?
Steven Spielberg’s diatribe against Ralph Nader, a far-flung vision of our dystopian, Al Gore-less future. The dire consequences of the 2000 Bush victory as dreamed into a paranoid future by a moderate liberal.
Tim Burton apes The Ten Commandments and reformats the Old Testament as a continuous, hairy loop.
Will the Abrahamic religions overcome their differences in time to save the world from secularism?
Heh-heh. Yeah, that’s it.
John Nash is Winston Smith from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Don’t worry, Winston. Big Brother is here to help you.
A moving near-documentary of rural poverty, says this Amazon reviewer.
This is the twentieth century of the mind. Memories forever.
Life in the Big City, as seen by young optimists who leave small towns to follow their dreams.
Love (or something) in the ruins. Ever since Little Boy, Japan and the U.S. have been co-enablers in a mutual identity problem.
Let us sell you your memories.
Hollywood’s love letter to the left brain: "Interpret Me!"
A disturbed student walks into the light.
Why the Green Goblin is the archetypical villain of the Viagra generation—and other sticky issues.
Epic quest or allegory of the Ph.D. process? Find out in this popular British interpretation from somewhere on the Internet.
Bad news for race relations as Hollywood validates the not-so-subliminal desires of the white man for the black woman.
A mathematician imagines that there is more to life than what can be touched, but it's just his schizophrenia talking.
Denzel Washington stars as George Herbert Walker Bush discovering the consequences of training your son to be the world's traffic cop.
Guy Pierce stars in an homage to the Post-It note.
How Mary Poppins corrupts the minds of our good capitalist youth.
Marketing the KKK.
What makes the Wiz so wonderful? It's the movie of the American Century—and the story of public relations.
Coziness v. greatness and Tolkien's real bittersweet geopolitics.
Is life a dream? With optimistic pessimism and pessimistic optimism, Linklater's characters talk out the unbearable lightness of being.
Animal Planet meets Magnolia as Guy Ritchie gives us a taste of Social Darwinism. Can we escape the food chain?
Why hot babes dig ugly rock stars.
Bang! Psychology is dead. The age of science is over. (If you don't believe us, just check out the WB.) Long live Mulder!
Phallic light sabers. X-Wing penetration. A dominatrix father. Ugh. Sounds like a tale of impotence.
This, for today’s postmodern feminist, is the nightmare known as motherhood.
The epic battle of Bill Gates and Steven Jobs is retold through the eyes of Gates.
David Lynch makes a two-hour intro to literary theory. Who needs "ceci n’est pas une pipe"? we have "no hay banda."
September 11, 2001 was like watching a movie. This is what we were watching.
The CEO of Coca-Cola lauds director Michael Bay for sacralizing their product.
Quentin Tarantino deconstructs the ultimate guy film.
Johnny Depp proves to be the best Clinton impersonator this side of Hollywood, deftly portraying the rise and fall of the former President.
Is Truman a sinner or a saint? Luther and Erasmus have a heated exchange over the sovereignty of Christof.
How do you like your steak?
The essay that started Metaphilm. Enter, if you dare . . .
The spiritual delusion of Buzz Lightyear.
Whit Stillman's famous interpretation of Disney's primer on love and marriage.
Hobbes is reborn as Tyler to save "Jack" (a grown-up Calvin) from the slough of un-comic despair.
What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul? The game of life turns out to be about dying.
Introducing the new James Bond for the Dumbo era: I'm Gump, Forrest Gump.