Jake Cole

Atlanta

Writer at Freelance

Writer at Slant Magazine

Like the phoenix from the ashes. Writing at @Slant_Magazine, @hyperallergic, others.

Articles

The Milestone Cinematheque

5 days ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

Charles Burnett’s little-seen 1999 dramedy The Annihilation of Fish is a curious outlier in the filmography of a director best known for his lyrical realism and interest in the ways that people’s characters are informed by their surroundings and history.
Fueled by Old-School Filmmaking Swagger

1 week ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

Narratively, F1: The Movie sets us on the well-worn road of so many sports movies. Here, a rookie racer, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), has plenty of raw talent but none of the experience to wield it properly, prompting a has-been, Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), to come out of a decades-long retirement from Formula One racing in order to show the kid the ropes.
'Dark City' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: Arrow Video

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

The urban hell hole in which Alex Proyas’s Dark City takes place is a passé science-fiction dystopia. As crafted by production designer Patrick Tatopoulos, the setting draws heavily from the sci-fi of the early 20th century. This is an analog world of clockwork gears, bulky gadgets, and wires that reveals a heavy debt to Fritz Lang that only deepens when taken in tandem with the noir costuming.
A Life in Four Chapters' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

More than a mere account of an artist’s life, Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is keyed to the aesthetic and spiritual evolution of postwar Japanese author Mishima Yukio (Ogata Ken). The film opens on the day of the artist’s failed coup d’état and subsequent suicide, then traces his life to that point via flashbacks.
The Four Musketeers' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

By 1973, Richard Lester, Philadelphia-born but as vital a figure in the cutting edge of ’60s British cinema as Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, had run his film career aground with a string of flops. But he never fully gave up on his plans to adapt The Three Musketeers, a project originally intended as a vehicle for the Beatles.
The Final Reckoning' Review: Adrenaline and Absurdity, Hand in Hand

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One too often gets bogged down in plot mechanics in the lead-up to the showdown between Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and renegade assassin Gabriel (Esai Morales) for control over an all-powerful A.I. system called the Entity. Luckily, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, takes advantage of its predecessor’s lugubrious narrative by hitting the ground running.
'How to Get Ahead in Advertising' Blu-ray Review

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

In Bruce Robinson’s debut feature, Withnail and I, the permanent scowl of Richard E. Grant’s character speaks to his anger at a world that fails to acknowledge his genius, his features made more gaunt and lifeless by alcoholism. The actor channels much of the same body language and aura as Withnail in Robinson’s 1987 sophomore feature, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, to play advertising executive Denis Bagley, though here the shambolic sense of grievance is replaced by mercenary superiority.
The Criterion Collection

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Joseph Jon Lanthier |Jake Cole

As part of an essay cycle that roves the cinema of the 1990s for vestiges of intelligent life, Phillip Lopate identifies several attributes that typify the early style of writer turned directors: creatively interpolated exposition, admirably ham-fisted mise-en-scène, and skewedly erudite characters among them.
'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Bill Weber |Bill and Brianne Weber |Jake Cole

Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg retains its direct appeal to the eyes, ears, and tear ducts after more than 60 years, with an emotionalism that’s shameless but never crass. A melodrama about first love set in the French port city of the title, it stood as a bold reinvention of the movie musical in 1964, just as the genre was beginning a nosedive in its Hollywood birthplace.
'A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness' Blu-ray Review: Radiance Films

2 months ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

After being blacklisted by Japan’s movie studios in 1967 for—as he himself put it later—making “films that make no sense and make no money,” nonconformist director Suzuki Seijun spent a decade confined to making television and video projects before being allowed to helm another feature. His comeback movie, 1977’s A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness, proved every bit as strange and singular as the films that got him shut out of studios in the first place.