Month: December 2018

The new film from Joel and Ethan Coen, called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and available to stream on Netflix, is an anthology of six vignettes about life in the Old West. Each story stands alone—the only apparent link between them is that they are presented as the different parts of an antique compendium of the same name: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Other Tales of the American Frontier, with Color Plates. The film’s first shot is this worn volume, and each tale begins and ends with the camera’s fading back to the book, whose pages have been...

I saw the film Mary, Queen of Scots at a screening accompanied by a short panel discussion in which various scholars specializing in sixteenth-century political and feminist history discussed the film’s representation of its period and characters, namely the two famous women at its helm: Mary, Queen of Scots,and Queen Elizabeth I. Our crowd had a lot of questions, mostly concerning how/whether the cinematic renderings did justice to their real-life counterparts. I’m guessing they asked so much within this theme because they, too, were put off or perplexed by the obvious and gauche liberties the film takes. What’s interesting...