ENG 281: Fall 2025 Resources #11

Abrams, Nathan. "Kubrick's World: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition." International Horizons (October 28, 2025) ["In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley Kubrick and what his work can teach us about our current era. From the nuclear absurdities of Dr. Strangelove to the cosmic rebirth of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s films expose the fragile line between technological mastery and moral collapse. Abrams unpacks Kubrick’s fascination with war, authority, and obedience, his roots in the New York Jewish intellectual tradition, and his exploration of mystical and mythic themes—from Kabbalah to The Odyssey. Together, they reveal how Kubrick’s cinematic universe reflects our own: a world where human creativity, paranoia, and power intertwine in both terrifying and illuminating ways."]

Budhathoki, Abishek. "After the Ban, Toward Enlightenment: Bhutan’s New Wave of Spiritual Cinema." Notebook (October 16, 2025) ["After a delayed start, Bhutanese filmmakers are creating a distinctive cinematic language grounded in their cultural memory, forging a new wave of cinema that stages a dialogue between tradition and innovation, spiritual insight and artistry. From this remarkably compressed timeframe has come a body of work that resists Western narrative and cinematic conventions. These films have proven that a national cinema does not require decades of development before achieving philosophical sophistication. Instead, by drawing directly from centuries of Buddhist thought and practice, Bhutan’s directors have created mature meditations on existence, attachment, and transcendence. As this youngest of all national cinemas continues to evolve, it stands as proof that innovation in film language comes from a thoughtful translation of tradition, essential insights, and storytelling strategies into contemporary forms."]

Burr, Ty. "What Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’ tried to tell us." The Washington Post (August 9, 2024) ["The surveillance state that seemed so far-fetched in 1974 turned out to be a mild harbinger of the state of surveillance 50 years later."]

Irazuzta, Javier. The Prop and the Production Designer." Notebook (October 3, 2025) ["Eight industry veterans discuss a single object or piece of scenery from their work and its role in the worlds of their films."]

Nayman, Adam. "Jafar Panahi’s Revenge Road Trip Masterpiece." The New Republic (October 14, 2025) ["It Was Just An Accident reckons with cruelty and repression."]

Now, Gaspar. "“Cinema Is Connected to Dreams”: Lucile Hadžihalilović, in Conversation with Gaspar Noé." Interview (October 13, 2025) ["Lucile, best known for her hypnotic, unsettling films Innocence, Evolution, and her latest, The Ice Tower, a haunting new work starring Marion Cotillard, has built a body of films that explore transformation, awakening, and the mystery of being alive. That morning, she and Gaspar talked about the movies that shaped her. They’ve shared a life in cinema, but this was the first time they had really sat down to do something like this: a filmmaker looking back on the stories and images that formed her. What follows is not just a talk about movies, but about the process itself, the work, the obsession, the joy."]

"One Battle After Another (USA: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)." Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive of Resources)

Rutigliano, Olivia. "Guillermo del Toro’s New Frankenstein Adaptation is Life-Giving." Literary Hub (October 29, 2025) ["Del Toro treats his Creature with love and tenderness, even more than Shelley does in her novel; he makes the Creature’s first word (and only word, for a while) “Victor,” the way a child might repeat “mama” or “dada” once it realizes it can refer to its protector with a name. Del Toro, who has written and produced this film in addition to directing it, deftly reads Shelley’s text as a story of parental abandonment, building out a wider story of parental abuse and neglect, emphasizing the tragic dehumanization and alienation that the Creature experiences after being forced into existence. That “Victor” means so much to the Creature even while “Victor” imprisons him, beats him, experiments on him, and tries to destroy him contains the thesis of the film. Del Toro bifurcates his version as Shelley does her novel, with each man getting to tell his story, but the whole movie, in effect, is a requiem for the Creature, who is governed above all else, by the desire to love and be loved in return."]