The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, now in paperback

The cover for the paperback edition of The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee: The Filmmaker Everyone Loves is here, and it uses two of the pain...

Chicago (1927)

(The unabridged and updated version of a Siren column about the 1927 silent version of Chicago, first published behind a paywall at the now-...

The Canon in the Early Silent Era pt.2

In my previous entry in this series I was looking at how the stories from the Hebrew Bible that the earliest filmmakers adapted into the f...

Nadal as the anti-Hitchcock hero (and other thoughts on tennis and suspense)

[ Did this piece for Mint Lounge’s tennis special ] The final leg of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 film Strangers on a Train has the narrative cr...

What about the good trip? Scattered thoughts on Udta Punjab

Is it a problem that my favourite scene in Udta Punjab isn’t one that depicts the horrific repercussions of drug use (as this film effectiv...

Madam Satan (1930)

(About five years ago the Siren had a column at a doomed little webzine called Nomad Widescreen, and she was in the habit of posting excerpt...

A man of two minds: on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

[Did this review for Scroll ] I am a man of two faces, and also a man of two minds, the narrator-protagonist of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer...