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Rebel Without a Cause and “The Kids Today!” By Arnold Anthony Schmidt It seems as if people have always complained about “the kids today!” Those young people don’t respect their elders. They’re wild. Too sexual. The satirist Juvenal, writing in the second century, paints Roman youth – and, in fairness, pretty much everyone else! – […]

Kiss Me Deadly: A Classic Film Noir with a Twist  By Arnold Anthony Schmid Admit it: when you think about film noir, you don’t associate it with the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti! Yet the suggestive role played by Rossetti’s 1862 sonnet “Remember” in Kiss Me Deadly illustrates only one of the many things that make […]

“A Road Trip With a Twist: Compartment No. 6”  By Arnold Anthony Schmidt  Like many, I particularly enjoy narratives in which audiences first see characters as one kind of person, only to have them end up as quite a different kind entirely. Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6 (2021), winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes […]

“Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” by Arnold Schmidt Films by Iranian Asghar Farhadi, one of the few directors to win two Oscars in the Best Foreign Language category, generally revolve around people making difficult, perhaps unresolvable, decisions. His most famous, the Oscar-winning 2011 A Separation, follows a family in which the […]