actor profiles
animation
book reviews
director profiles
documentaries
experimental &
avant garde
exploitation
film festivals
film noir
film reviews
gay & lesbian
hong kong films
horror
interviews
japanese cinema
music & musicals
silent film
tranny cinema
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Actor Profiles
in issue 60
Fatal Instincts: The Dangerous Pout of Gloria Grahame — "I'm a girl who loves to be manhandled! After all, what are a few contusions or abrasions if you get the man you love?" — Gloria Grahame, 1953
Looking at Charlie — The Circus: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin — Life in the ring
Birds Do It, Bees Do It: Isabella Rossellini Talks About Bug Sex, Human Sex, and Green Porno — "A laugh and information!"
in issue 59
Naomi Watts: Cinema's Postmodern Mother of Mirrors — "We're home free in the new mediated womb of the Naomi persona — which is to say, trapped, by our own desire."
Nuts to the Squirrels and Roués Redeemed: The Discreet Charm of Charles Boyer — "In Boyer, self-belief and theatrical technique are seamlessly fused together."
Ode to Lili: And Leslie Caron — "This MGM movie is studio-system filmmaking at its most protective, and it's designed entirely to showcase Leslie Caron . . ."
On the Walkabout: Remembering Heath Ledger (1979-2008) — "Wasn't he just there, standing right in front of us?"
in issue 58
Colleen Moore Comes Back: On the Rediscovered, Restored 1927 Rarity Her Wild Oat — "Go sit on a flagpole!"
in issue 57
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: The Elusive Pleasures of Irene Dunne — "You'd never get tired of having her around, because she'd always be someone else for you."
Auspicious Beginnings: Nicholson's Leitmotif in Five Easy Pieces — "His characters have tended to be more bewildered by life and disgusted by a world that won't cooperate."
in issue 56
Uneasy Living: The Insecure Charm of Jean Arthur — "Funny, tender, a little neurotic, a little erotic, and always spontaneous . . ."
Extinguishing Features: The Last Years of Richard Pryor — A genius self-destructs, with a little help from Hollywood
in issue 55
The Reckless Art of Erich von Stroheim: Part One: The Pinnacle — "Like every other skilled fabulist on earth there would forever be a part of Stroheim that truly believed his own fantasies."
Looking at Charlie: The Idle Class, Payday, The Pilgrim, and A Woman of Paris: An Occasional Series on the Art and Life of Charlie Chaplin — "Now, Goliath was a big man."
Janet Gaynor — If she was forced, like so many actors, to live a closeted life, she at least did it as much on her own terms as she could in those tricky times.
in issue 54
The Martyrdom of Lulu: Louise Brooks at 100 — "If I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife."
in issue 53
Mish-Mash Planet: The Cult of Rita Hayworth in You Were Never Lovelier — "Speaking of impurity: what was Rita Hayworth's image supposed to be in the '40s?"
A Frontline Guy — An Interview with Burt Young — "Get Burt!"
Looking at Charlie — First National, Shoulder Arms, and The Kid: An Occasional Series on the Art and Life of Charlie Chaplin — "LOST CHILD WANTED — Last seen with a little man with large flat feet and a small moustache"
in issue 52
Kay Francis, Secrets of an Actress: New Books Reveal the "Wavishing" Star — "I'm not a star, I'm a woman, and I want to get fucked!"
Game On: The Gold Diggers of Heartbreakers — The screwball comedy's back, and Weaver's got it
Mystique Without Camp: The Allure of the Leading Man — Turning "the male gaze" on men
in issue 51
Blossom in the Dust: Lillian Gish, The Wind, and Mr. Griffith — "I was never young, and if you were never young, how can you ever feel old?"
Brigitte Lin — Sexual ambiguity is one of the hallmarks of Hong Kong cinema's golden age, and no one did it better than Lin Ching-Hsia, aka Brigitte Lin
in issue 50
Golden Boy: The Sexy Ways of Joel McCrea — "Easy to overlook but endlessly rewarding to look over"
Beautiful Dead Girl: The Olive Thomas Collection on DVD — "She's got the eyes of a great one, putting over something incalculable . . ."
in issue 49
Margaret Sullavan and the Art of Dying — "Now ... here comes the paradox ... "
Angela Mao — The "deadly China doll" widely viewed, during her heyday in the early 1970s, as the female Bruce Lee
in issue 48
Hooker with a Heart of Darkness: Jane Fonda in Klute — Bree Daniels trumps all Fonda's real-life characters
in issue 47
"Plant Your Feet and Tell the Truth": An Interview with Clint Eastwood — On Million Dollar Baby and a million-dollar career
Esther Williams — The only actress who ever built a movie career on swimming
in issue 45
The Ballad of Stella Stevens: An Interview — In which Stella tells all — or at least most
Looking at Charlie: Keystone and Essanay Days — The first in an occasional series of articles on the life and work of Charlie Chaplin
in issue 42
The Trouble with the Governator — The ascension of Arnold — salvation, apocalypse, or trigger for a resurgent left?
Katrin Cartlidge: A Tribute — Her brilliant career
Wheeler & Woolsey Queered — The downright peculiar pleasures of pre-Code Wheeler & Woolsey
in issue 41
"It's customary for the boy to have his father's watch." Gregory Peck 1916-2003 — Now we really need him
in issue 40
Desperately Seeking Ginger — Hollywood Rhythms, Vol. 2 on DVD offers relief for the Ginger-deprived
Unintentional Camp and the Image of Will Smith — Camp — and coded queerness — finds a surprisingly happy home in the films in Will Smith
"Fabulous Gowns but No Pussy!" An Interview with Holly Woodlawn — A superstar talks Trash and papayas
in issue 35
Bardot on DVD Offers Vintage Titillation — "See that girl? Her ass is a song."
in issue 34
Divine — The life of the Pink Flamingos star, as told by his mother in My Son Divine
in issue 33
Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes — Livin’ large with the Hung One
in issue 32
Manhattan to America: Drop Dead! — The New Yorker takes a slap at Julia Roberts
in issue 31
An Evening with Jackie Chan — Jackie spills his guts — verbally, this time. A 1993 interview from the Bright Lights archives.
in issue 30
Tokuko Nagai Takagi (1891 – 1919), Japan's first film actress — This forgotten star was caught up — and perhaps crushed — by larger historical forces
in issue 29
Sex: The Annabel Chong Story — Liberated porn queen or psychological wreck? You be the judge
in issue 28
Louise Hassing — Dogme secrets revealed by Lars von Trier's "most promising actress"
in issue 27
A Gallery of Pre-Code Women — Marlene Dietrich, Clara Bow, Tallulah Bankhead, Virginia Bruce, Billie Dove, Marion Davies, and Norma Shearer
in issue 26
Jean Arthur — John Oller's Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew is a surprisingly detailed, highly readable account of a complex woman whose integrity and perfectionism — and sometimes pettiness and even arrogance — both fueled her work and undermined it at almost every turn.
in issue 24
Sylvia Miles — In an interview, Sylvia Miles discusses her Oscar-nominated performance in Midnight Cowboy, her peerless rendering of a washed-up B-movie star in Paul Morrissey's Heat, and dumping a plate of spaghetti on critic John Simon's head after a particularly nasty review.
in issue 23
Harvey Keitel — By many accounts one of the most generous, inspiring actors on the set, he's also frequently portrayed as an impossible perfectionist who lashes out at what he sees as the imperfections of others.
in issue 22
Joe Dallesandro —
Working-class Joe, a product of New York's foster homes and reform schools, was unique among Andy Warhol's menagerie of pathologically self-deluded, speed-talking "superstars." If most of them made up in personality what they lacked in looks or humanity, Joe was just the opposite — a sweet, shy, deliriously sexy cipher whose unflappable calm provided its own kind of campy counterpoint to Warhol's shrieking harridans and maniacal drag queens.
in issue 19
Joan Crawford — During an astonishing fifty-year career, Joan Crawford kept her name blazing in letters of fire. You could dislike her, but you could not ignore her. She was simply too big to be overlooked. Everything about her was oversize: her eyes, brows, mouth, jawline, shoulders, and of course, her gestures.
in issue 18
Bette Davis — Millions of moviegoers responded to the challenge of her headstrong, neurotic heroines who, like Frankenstein's monster, were made of mismatched parts and bolts of electricity. Her cluster of quirks attracted as they repelled.
in issue 17
Laurel and Hardy — Three articles: Stealing the Clowns Clothes looks at Laurel's relationship with Chaplin; Eternal Child examines Laurel's roots in in the classic commedia dell'arte; Ollie's Somersault shows Ollie doing the impossible for his pal.
in issue 16
Carmen Miranda — The "lady in the tutti-fruitti hat" brought to American wartime audiences an extravagantly seductive surface: the exoticism of her native country, a sensuality tempered by caricature, and outlandish costumes and fruit-laden "hats" that have an unsuspected origin in the black slums of Brazil.
Norma Shearer — Shearer's poise, intelligence, her seemingly easy laughter, and sense of high style masked a deep insecurity and a tendency
toward depression. Her face in fact often has a hard, masklike quality; her smile seems chiseled, unbreakable — the body armor of self-creation.
Jean Seberg — Jean Seberg was always more icon than actress. From her disastrous appearance as the title character in Preminger's Saint Joan, to Godard's immortalizing of her face in Breathless, to her status as fashion maven in the 1960s, to her extracurricular work with the Black Panthers, Seberg's acting career seemed secondary to her cultural presence from the beginning.
Asta Nielsen — Asta Nielsen, the Danish silent movie actress who is often called "the first great international star," made 74 films between 1910 and 1932. Garbo herself acknowledged the woman who co-starred with her in The Joyless Street, saying "she taught me everything I know."
in issue 15
Lon Chaney, Sr. — With his lacerations, deformities, faux stump legs, and shaved head, Chaney was the original Modern Primitive. He made his first films in the mid-1910s, and by 1920 was already creating roles that required him to be armless, legless, crippled, or otherwise deformed.
