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Feature Four Frames

Four Frames: revisiting The Game, David Fincher’s under the radar thriller

The Game is a film about awareness and relationships, with Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), a wealthy businessman protagonist who keeps the world at a considered distance. Van Orton reduces almost all relationships to services – an that fits the capitalist economy in which he operates. His world is constructed of near-hermetically sealed spheres: the private […]

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Feature Four Frames

Four Frames: The Guest (Adam Wingard, 2014)

Adam Wingard uses close attention to sightlines and shot-reverse-shot editing to atomise and dislocate relations in a grief-stricken New Mexico family in their 2014 horror-thriller The Guest. The Petersons have lost their eldest son, Caleb, who has died in combat whilst fighting for the US army. The unexpected arrival of David (Dan Stevens), a charismatic […]

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Feature Thousand Words

Thousand Words: Deconstructing The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

With Ruby Sparks (2012), is Zoe Kazan attempting to deconstruct that most idealised of ‘noughties’ cinematic tropes, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (or MPDG)? And if so, just where will a sensitive ‘new’ man be able to go from there to reassert his ‘masculinity’? Calvin Weir-Fields, the ‘wonder boy’ author at the centre of Ruby […]

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Feature Four Frames

Four Frames: La vie de Jésus (Bruno Dumont, 1997)

For most of La vie de Jésus Bruno Dumont has his audience riding pinion with a gang of bored young motorcyclists. They roam aimlessly around a widescreen rendered, rural northeastern France, waiting for their lives to happen, or for someone to merely notice they are there. However, a potentially racist act of violence towards the […]