There’s an undeniable purity to Nobody. It’s bloody, bruised, and battered, but that’s the makeup of pure action. Flying punches and lovingly wielded guns hung on a framework plot that’s mostly there to get us from set piece to set piece, this is a specific kind of film that’s just getting back in vogue thanks…
Built in 1816 to carry the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal, the Edstone Aqueduct is the longest canal aqueduct in England (although there are longer ones in both Scotland and Wales and a number of higher ones too). It is 475 feet long and 33 feet high at its highest point. The engineer was William Whitmore. Read moreA…
This old Baldwin locomotive once served the local lumber industry, hauling huge tree trunks from the forest to the mills. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonConstructed in Pennsylvania in 1911, the train came to Arizona in 1917 when it was purchased by the Arizona Lumber and Timber Company. It passed through various…
Old Delhi is bursting with history and with modern-day activity. Built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in the mid-1600s as a walled city called Shahjahanabad, it served as the capital’s empire from then until the British Raj gained supremacy in 1857. Though India’s current center of government rests a few miles south in New…
As filmmakers were forced to adjust to the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year, the SXSW film slate for 2021 is a good indicator of the many ways it has altered cinema. Many movies were visually and tonally affected by our ‘new normal’ from 2020. Filmmakers had to create narratives around ideas…
In a remote rainforest in Madagascar’s northeast, Doménico Randimbiharinirina and Dominik Schüßler wandered into a ghost town. Its inhabitants were long gone, and the wooden frames and thatched roofs of dozens of huts slumped and rotted into creeping vegetation. Locals had told the two scientists about this abandoned village. About three years earlier, it was…
If you look closely, you can find a little star embedded in the wall of the Mosque-Cathedral in Córdoba. Known to some as the Estrella de los Deseos (Wishing Star), this star exactly is located in a corner of the Cathedral-Mosque, next to Torrijos street. It is actually a type of fossil. People who walk…
When photographer Vladimir Cech saw fresh lynx tracks by a fallen tree in the border region of the Bohemian Forest in Czechia, he hoped that his homemade DSLR camera traps would catch the wildcat. They didn’t, but what he did get was spectacular: a quiet image of a red fox delicately making its way across…
The easternmost point in Denmark might be also its most remote. Christiansø is a small Danish island, part of the archipelago known as Ertholmene, which is located 18 kilometers (11 miles) northeast of the island of Bornholm. It is also home to the easternmost point in Denmark (Greenland and the Faroe Islands included). Read moreA Guide to…
Welcome to How’d They Do That? — a monthly column that unpacks moments of movie magic and celebrates the technical wizards who pulled them off. This entry explains how they shot the trippy “stargate” sequence at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is difficult to speak about 2001: A Space Odyssey without careening…
Executive produced by Kelly Marie Tran, the heartwarming portrait (and documentary feature competition winner) “Lily Topples the World” celebrates the artistry of 20-year-old Lily Hevesh, one of the most popular domino masters on YouTube. (By the end of the doc’s filming, she’s reached around three million subscribers.) On her channel Hevesh5, Hevesh offers viewers a fantastic…
In our monthly column Laughed to Death, we look at the way comedy and existentialism go hand-in-hand in seemingly unlikely ways. For this installment, Brianna Zigler explores the murky approach to sex when it comes to multiverse theory and time loops in two examples: Palm Springs and 50 First Dates. “What would you do if you…
SXSW’s eclectic festival has gone virtual for this year and it could be amongst the last all-digital versions of the major film festivals as a promising global vaccine rollout suggests a healthy return to physical editions after the summer. The programmers at SXSW 2021 have wonderfully fulfilled their remit of showcasing high-quality, unique and innovative…
Queerly Ever After is a bi-monthly column where I take a look at LGBT+ films that gave their characters a romantic happily-ever-after. There will be spoilers. Also, don’t forget to buy your Queerly Ever After merch right here. Yad (Majd Mardo) is a 26-year-old Syrian-Dutch man, he has just returned home to his parents after being…
“You and I, we should turn the page.” Watch this official trailer for the indie drama The Man Who Sold His Skin, from Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania. This is one of the five Best International Feature nominees at the Oscars this year, an interesting choice considering the quality of all the films submitted. But…
“Why this obsession to find prodigies?” “Inferiority complex… we are not the geniuses who made history. That’s it.” Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonThis exchange between Nathanael Silverberg (Andrzej Chyra) and Mieko Saga (Yuki Saito), two judges of the Shogei International Piano Competition, encapsulates a dark reality of being a talented youth….
The glass skywalk of Cabo Girão, situated at the top of the highest promontory in Europe, is the highest cliff skywalk in Europe. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonSituated nearly 2,000 feet (580 meters) above sea level, the cliff walk first opened in 2012. It is composed of a suspended glass platform, which…
Chuck Lorre is the latest progressive to learn the ugly truth about Cancel Culture. No amount of liberal bona fides can provide you with full protection from the woke mob. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonLorre routinely ends his shows with “Vanity Cards” sharing progressive messages. Consider how he mocked Donald Trump’s…
The most famous work by the progressive feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman is her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in 1892. Written after Gilman had experienced a bout of postpartum depression that doctors attempted to treat by forcing her to do as little as possible — the then much-vaunted “rest cure”— the story uses…
Parkersburg has been dubbed proudly by its residents as “the birthplace of West Virginia.” This small city sitting on the Ohio River served as the Union’s very first invasion point into the Confederate states, changing the course of the Civil War. The state of West Virginia was born by those remaining loyal to the Union,…
Nearly 200 miles of tunnels snake beneath Helsinki, providing a weatherproof subterranean playground for the Finnish capital’s residents and visitors. Yet hidden behind the bright lights of the underground attractions—which include a museum, church, go-kart track, hockey rink, and more—are emergency shelters fitted with life-sustaining equipment: an air fiation system, an estimated two-week supply of…