movies

In Silicon Valley, Paul Martino is known as a serial entrepreneur who later founded Bullpen Capital to invest in such startups as FanDuel, Ipsy, and SpotHero.The other side: In Hollywood, he's the guy making a movie about his cousin…

This has been an incredible year for the Walt Disney Company. Not only has Avengers: Endgame become the best-selling movie in box office history, but Disney currently holds all four slots for this year’s top-earning films. However,…

The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is re-publishing this conversation.Karim Amer’s The Great Hack is a tour de force of the digital…

Goodness is extremely difficult to portray convincingly in the movies. Or in literature, for that matter – the villains in the novels of Dickens, for example, are almost always juicier than his paragons of virtue. Any actor…

Yes. Sometimes. Sort of.One of the most common conspiracy theories you hear in this line of research is that the Pentagon and CIA fund Hollywood movies. This isn’t entirely untrue — the CIA covertly funded productions of Animal Farm and…

You’re being shot at *BANG BANG BANG*. You notice that there is a pool, five feet deep. From your movie knowledge, you recall that water stops bullets.*image from google*Movies that show these scenes are not far from the truth. Let me…

A son might rise and become a father; a daughter might become a mother; an admirer of art, an artist. Such transitions are uneasy and unsure. You try to carry your line forward while improving on it, but there seem to be no rules. What…

The very notion of a director’s first feature is at the core of cinematic modernity, because the first director whose first feature is is synonymous with both his artistic acclaim and a revolution in the art form is Orson Welles, with…

Midsommar.(Photo: A24)Ari Aster makes scary movies. The times we're in make them even scarier. Aster isn't a political filmmaker by any traditional definition, but the two features he's directed—last year's Hereditary and the stunning…

Ari Aster is a writer and director of cult movies—his two features, “Hereditary,” from 2018, and “Midsommar,” which opened last week, are both grotesque and gory dramas about cults. “Hereditary” showed a family’s destruction by an…