Film
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The Rumpus Review of The Witch
The most interesting part of The Witch is that the family is so convinced of humanity’s fallen, sinful nature that it never occurs to them to even look for an aggressor from without.
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The Double Agency of Will Smith in Sci-Fi
Smith’s characters act as witnesses for the rehabilitated offender, the white-supremacist nation-state.
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The Rumpus Review of The Big Short
My reading of the audience’s reaction to the bombast of The Big Short is not that people genuinely find the story amusing, but rather, that we are experiencing discomfort while simultaneously expecting to be entertained.
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The Rumpus Review of The Revenant
On its surface, The Revenant is a story about revenge and survival. On a deeper level, it’s about how those two motivations factor into a generational battle between the (God-like) forces of nature and industry—a sort of perverted Armageddon.
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#OscarsSoWhite: Calling Out Academy Bias
Instead of influencing our movie-going habits, The Academy can take its cues from us. We can continue to speak up through social media and—more importantly—our dollars.
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The Circle Is Watching
In a world where boundaries between private and public are already blurring, Tim and Nicolaas wanted to find out what would happen if those boundaries disappeared altogether.
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Anomalisa, the Insanity of Capitalism, and the Power of Culture
Our insane system: does it feel too risky to bring this up in the mainstream press?
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The Saturday Rumpus Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
However, it’s taken me too long to say: The Force Awakens really is a fun and breathtaking movie
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The Saturday Rumpus Review: Carol
Carol is a powerful woman with enviable self-knowledge, effortlessly creating an erotic, sensual ideal of herself as a covert spectacle for queer midcentury women.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Suffragette and Feminist Inaction
A significant issue in the suffragette movement was its racist treatment of women of color.
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The Saturday Rumpus Review: 99 Homes
99 Homes continues Bahrani’s tendency to take on big topics, to cut them into chewable pieces for its audience
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The Saturday Rumpus Review of The Martian
It is the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars for about a year, all by himself.