~openculture | Bookmarks (28)

Studio Ghibli fans are still pondering the meaning of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, which came out last year. Though by some measure the studio’s most lavish feature yet — not least by the measure of it being the most expensive film yet produced in Japan — it’s also the one least amenable […]

Los Pollos Hermanos, Madrigal Electromotive, Mesa Verde Bank and Trust, Davis & Main: Attorneys at Law—all of these brands come from the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe. They also appear in the Fictional Brands Archive, a website dedicated to “fictional brands found in films, series and video games.” Taking the brands seriously as brands, the […]

Depending on how you reckon it, the “American century” has already ended, is now drawing to its close, or has some life left in it yet. But whatever its boundaries, that ambiguous period has been culturally defined by one medium above all: film, or more broadly speaking, motion pictures. These very words might start a […]

There was a time, not so very long ago, when many Americans watching movies at home neither knew nor cared who directed those movies. Nor did they feel particularly comfortable with dialogue that sometimes came subtitled, or with the “black bars” that appeared below the frame. The considerable evolution of these audiences’ general relationship to […]

The YouTube channel Lost in Time has taken footage from the legendary Lumière brothers, originally shot in 1896, then upscaled and colorized it, giving us a chance to see a distant world through a modern lens. Nearing the end of the 19th century, the film pioneers (and their employees) visited different parts of the world […]

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who recognize the phrase “corny dialogue that would make the pope weep,” and those who don’t. If you fall into the former category, your mind is almost certainly filled with images of bleak Midwestern winters, modest trailer homes, hooded figures smashing an already-junkyard-worthy car, and […]

The protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a “fireman” tasked with incinerating what few books remain in a domestic-screen-dominated future society forced into illiteracy. Late in life, Ray Bradbury declared that he wrote the novel because he was “worried about people being turned into morons by TV.” This tinges with a certain irony given […]

Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party, Hollywood royalty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Billy Wilder lined up to meet the Russian filmmaker. But the […]

  When we’ve already heard about someone’s personal scandal in the news, do we need to also see it dramatized with A‑list actors? Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker discuss Todd Haynes’ 2023 film May December fictionalizing the long-aftermath of the much publicized Mary Kay Letourneau story. The main events […]

If you’re an even mildly enthusiastic filmgoer, these two short compilations from The Solomon Society will get your life flashing before your eyes. They transport me to my ninth birthday screening of The Nightmare Before Christmas; my VHS viewings of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at home sick from school; the obsession with Blade Runner that […]

The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often referred to as pioneers of cinema, and their 45-second La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), is often referred to as the first film. But history turns out to present a more complicated picture. As previously featured here […]

The film distribution company Kino Lorber now allows you to stream complete films on YouTube for free. Since we first mentioned this initiative back in 2022, the list of streamable films has grown. Among the now 146 films, you will find a mixture of documentaries and cinematic works, including Derek Jarman’s Blue; Fela Kuti: Music […]

A little over four years ago, we featured here on Open Culture a set of realistic images of people who don’t actually exist. They were, as we would now assume, wholly generated by an artificial-intelligence system, but back in 2018, there were still those who doubted that such a thing could be done without furtive […]

Few cities have been as romanticized as Paris, and few eras in Paris have been as romanticized as the nineteen-twenties. This owes much to the famous expatriate artistic and literary figures residing there in that decade: Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Man Ray, to name just […]

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland predates the invention of cinema by a couple of decades. Nevertheless, much like the “Drink me” bottle and “Eat me” presented to its young protagonist, Lewis Carroll’s fantastical tale has called out the same message to generations of filmmakers around the world: “Adapt me.” This century, though not even a quarter […]

Of the three collaborations jazz singer Cab Calloway made with cute cartoon legend Betty Boop, this 1933 Dave Fleischer-directed “Snow White” is probably the most successful. It certainly is the most strange—more hallucinatory than the first in the series “Minnie the Moocher”, and less slapstick-driven than “The Old Man of the Mountain.” It is a […]

“Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature. “But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art.” When, “as in the immortal […]

Evan Puschak, the video essayist better known as the Nerdwriter, has seen a lot of movies. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured his analyses of a range of pictures including Blade Runner, Reservoir Dogs, Parasite, La Dolce Vita, Nostalghia, and You’ve Got Mail. When he notices something special about the films coming out of […]

The nature documentary series Our Planet opens with a startlingly stark observation courtesy of broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and author Sir David Attenborough: Just 50 years ago, we finally ventured to the moon… Since then, the human population has more than doubled… (and) In the last 50 years, wildlife populations have, on average, declined by […]

The word sophisticated may sound like praise today, but it originated as more of an accusation. Trace its etymology back far enough and you’ll encounter the sophists, itinerant lecturers in ancient Greece who taught subjects like philosophy, mathematics, music, and rhetoric — the last of which they mastered no matter their ostensible subject area. Their […]

Oliver Hermanus’ latest film Living transplants the story of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to postwar London. Apart from its own considerable merits, it has given viewers across the world reason to revisit the 1952 original, a standout work even in a golden decade of Japanese cinema — the decade The Cinema Cartography co-creator Lewis Bond (previously […]

During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction. These films were set in dark locations and shot in a black & white aesthetic that fit like a glove. Hardened men wore fedoras and forever smoked cigarettes. Women played the femme fatale role brilliantly. Love was the […]

More than thirty years after it was first privately published in 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover became the subject of the most famous obscenity trial in English history. Though the ultimate decision of R v Penguin Books Ltd in favor of the publisher opened a cultural floodgate in that country, the novel was also subject to […]

Happy New Year! We can now “do to Disney what Disney did to the great works of the public domain before him,” according to Harvard law professor and public domain expert, Lawrence Lessig, hailed by The New Yorker as “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era.” On January 1, Mickey Mouse […]