Issue Nine …

  • Something Like an Obituary
    Cinema’s Summer of Loss
    BY Gary Mairs

  • They Don’t Use Straitjackets Anymore?
    Mental Illness in Popular Media
    BY Kevin Fullam

  • The Forgotten Actor
    George Segal
    BY Phil Nugent

  • Alone and Forsaken
    Images of Man at the Mercy of Nature in Gerry, Grizzly Man, Survivorman, and Man Vs. Wild
    BY Hayden Childs

Issue Eight …

  • Come Into My Boudoir
    Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep
    BY Leonard Pierce

  • The Bottom Shelf
    Attack of the Arthouse Sci-Fi Movie
    BY Scott Von Doviak

Issue Seven …

  • Indistinguishable From Magic
    AI fiction and reality
    BY JOSH WILSON

  • Silverbacks, Silver Screens
    the zen of film monkeys
    BY LEONARD PIERCE

Issue Six …

  • The Life Fascistic
    Fascist Aesthetics in the Films of Wes Anderson
    BY DAVID NORDSTROM

  • Freddy Got a Bum Rap
    Tom Green’s Film Triumph
    BY ISAAC KELLEY

  • The Bottom Shelf
    Academy of the Underrated Edition
    BY SCOTT VON DOVIAK

Issue Five …

  • Lost Edens, Unsung Heroes, and Metalheads on the Couch
    Recent rock documentaries
    BY PHIL NUGENT

  • The Bottom Shelf
    Brando
    BY SCOTT VON DOVIAK

Issue Four …

  • More Than a Master of Everyday Horror
    The films of Michael Haneke
    BY BRONWYN JONES

  • Not a Miracle But a Machine Gun
    The case for Dogville
    BY GARY MAIRS

  • Beware of Dogville
    The case against …
    BY PHIL NUGENT

  • The Bottom Shelf
    Bad Trips
    BY SCOTT VON DOVIAK

Issue Three …

  • Delicate Renaissance
    Films from the Former Yugoslavia
    By Bronwyn Jones

  • The Bottom Shelf
    Year-End Edition
    By Scott Von Doviak

  • Underground Men
    American Splendor and Bad Santa
    By Phil Nugent

Issue Two …

  • Lost In Translation
    While touted in some reviews as a Brief Encounter-like romance, Lost in Translation is much more than that, including an examination of aging — the confusion met upon reaching adulthood, the staleness of married life and the aloofness of being past your prime.
    by George Wu

    Special Feature: Sam Peckinpah

    • Introduction
      Welcome to The High Hat’s Sam Peckinpah feature.
      by Hayden Childs


    • Looks That Kill
      What is unique to Peckinpah is the distribution of these points of identification. Rather than focusing on the protagonists alone, the audience is encouraged also to witness the action from the perspectives of horrified onlookers and victims of crossfire.
      by Gary Mairs

    • Ride the High Country
      A film of abundant visual beauty, it’s also a highly literate one through whose heart blows a chill valedictory breeze.
      by Tom Block

    • Major Dundee
      Moby Dick tells us that pursuing your obsessions can destroy you; Peckinpah should have been more wary.
      by Hayden Childs

    • Algonquin Kids’ Table: The Wild Bunch
      In which various participants gush and squibble over Peckinpah’s classic tale of bad men in bad times.

    • Straw Dogs
      If Peckinpah truly wanted to make Death Wish, he'd have made Death Wish. But Straw Dogs isn’t a vengeance orgy at all unless you’re not quite paying attention.
      by Dana Knowles

    • Junior Bonner
      The Tao of Sam Peckinpah.
      by Hayden Childs

    • Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
      The very title suggests a brace of opposing forces, an either/or that needs sorting out, but it’s a riddle that Peckinpah, even had he been sober and left to his own devices, had no intention of solving because he knew it couldn’t be done.
      by Tom Block

    • Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia
      There’s no heroic scale, little beauty, and the tenderest relationship is between a man who’s dead and one who ought to be. All that’s left is a vein of black humor a mile thick and a feeling of disgusted rage potent enough to blow you across the room.
      by Phil Nugent

    • The Bottom Shelf: Convoy
      It was as if Stanley Kubrick had decided to follow Barry Lyndon with a lavish adaptation of “Disco Duck.”
      by Scott Von Doviak

    • The Osterman Weekend
      Peckinpah was always a foe of received wisdom, and this is why: The Osterman Weekend isn't a terrible movie. It’s not even a bad movie. It’s certainly not a great movie, but its status as the movie that literally and figuratively buried him is entirely unjust.
      by Leonard Pierce

    • Pick a Peck of Poses
      A Beginner’s Field Guide to the Peckinpah Actor.
      by Phil Nugent

Issue One …

  • Pistol Opera
    “Before Suzuki, primo Japanese cinema was a Rolls Royce. After him, it was a ’68 Camaro Z28, and it would never be the same again.”
    by George Wu

  • For the Sake of the Children
    The Long Courtship and Short Marriage of Comics and Movies
    by Leonard Pierce

  • The Bottom Shelf
    “Reality television is the current favorite whipping boy of the culture, with each new Survivor knockoff or Bachelor clone castigated as yet another portent of the inexorable decline and fall of civilization.”
    by SCOTT VON DOVIAK