Bright Lights Film Journal

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    • Latest Stories

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    • Collective Subjects and Soviet Subjectivities: The Counterplan, A Severe Young Man, and the Paradoxes of Socialist Realism

      July 9, 2025

    • Games of Logic and Longing: The Quiet Radicalism of Éric Rohmer

      July 3, 2025

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  • Essays · LGBT & Queer · Politics · Romance · Russia

    0

    Collective Subjects and Soviet Subjectivities: The Counterplan, A Severe Young Man, and the Paradoxes of Socialist Realism

    • July 9, 2025

    “The history of ideas is the history of the spite of certain solitaries.” – E. M. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided * * * It was at the 1934 First[…]

  • Directors · Drama · French Cinema · Nouvelle Vague

    0

    Games of Logic and Longing: The Quiet Radicalism of Éric Rohmer

    • July 3, 2025

    In an age of clickbait politics and algorithmic attention spans, there’s something quietly revolutionary about refusing to manufacture drama. Rohmer’s refusal to manipulate emotion – to cue violins or insert[…]

  • Drama · Romance · Youth

    0

    Brat Facts: Why St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) Still Attracts an Audience After 40 Years of Bad Reviews

    • June 28, 2025

    For anyone who was coming of age during the eighties, St. Elmo’s represented the height of hubris. It represented the height of yuppiedom and suburban sprawl. It represented the height[…]

  • Reviews · SF & Fantasy

    4

    The Birds, the Birds, and the Beatles

    • June 23, 2025

    One of the delights of running a film review website is being able to repost an article just because we feel like it. Admittedly, we have many to choose from[…]

Most Recent

Drama · Essays · Film Crews · Hollywood · News · Production · Production History · Stuntwork

0

The Silver Screen Is Rusting: Why Rust Can’t Happen Again

  • June 17, 2025

Even if Rust is defined as professional by its crew, the danger that allows a crew member to die cannot coexist with the description of professional. If that is professional,[…]

Crime · Drama · Essays

0

The Body Embarrassed: “Cringing” as Empathetic Response to American Beauty and The Talented Mr. Ripley

  • June 11, 2025

As American Beauty deals with visualized and thematic pleasure by giving us “beauty” in both sexualized and desexualized forms, and Ripley makes us feel like a voyeur alongside its protagonist[…]

More

Drama · Historical & Epic · War · Women in Film

0

The Feminist Undercurrents of The Brutalist: Women as the Backbone of Power and Legacy

  • June 6, 2025

In contrast to the patriarchal norms that dominate “American” family values, The Brutalist quietly insists on the indispensable role of women in guiding not just familial stability but broader legacies[…]

African American · Class System · Colonialism · Exile and Displacement · Historical & Epic · Horror · Race · Religion & Spirituality

0

The Price of Being Let In: Sinners and the Lie of Liberation

  • May 28, 2025

From the erasure of Native knowledge to the internal hierarchies among the oppressed, from religion’s double edge to the seduction of assimilation, Coogler’s film maps the mechanisms of survival within[…]

Covid-19 · Disease and Epidemics · Men & Masculinity · Military and Paramilitary · Pandemic · SF & Fantasy

0

Life Is Wonderful: Double Apocalypse and Redemption in Virus: Day of Resurrection (1980)

  • May 21, 2025

As a single-minded seismologist posted in Antarctica who predicts the disastrous DC quake, Yoshizumi embodies the willful blindness and debasement of humans in the Cold War era: like those who[…]

Comedy · Directors · Indies · Interviews · Thrillers & Action

0

Joel Potrykus talks Vulcanizadora, Being “Really Immature,” and What He Thinks Hell Is Like

  • May 16, 2025

I love it when someone just absolutely shoves the vision down your throat. * * * Vulcanizadora, Joel Potrykus’ fifth feature film, hit the festival circuit last spring with a[…]

Essays

0

Oscar Nom Bomb: 2025 Drops a New Deus ex Machina in the Oscar Machine

  • May 10, 2025

A plot device where an unexpected event resolves a seemingly unsolvable problem is called a “deus ex machina” which translates to “god from the machine” in Latin; it often refers[…]

Class System · Documentaries · Drama · Eco

0

Class, Capitalism, and Freedom: Connecting Jorge Furtado’s Ilha das Flores and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite

  • May 5, 2025

At first glance, Ilha das Flores and Parasite, separated by thirty years, appear to have little in common. Despite their many surface-level differences, however, they bear striking similarities. Both are[…]

Psychology · Religion & Spirituality · SF & Fantasy

0

Salvation from the Skies: Carl Jung Watches The Day the Earth Stood Still

  • April 30, 2025

In the same way that reading Jung can provide insight into The Day the Earth Stood Still, it is also the case that watching the movie can illuminate aspects of[…]

Drama · Sex & Relationships

0

The Myth of Los Angeles’ (Fiery) Destruction and the People Who Tell a Different Story: From Souls for Sale (1923) to Model Shop (1969)

  • April 25, 2025

You need the virus to build the antidote, and so it should come as no surprise that movies made in Los Angeles are among the most powerful remedies to the[…]

Drama · Essays

0

“Look Closer”: The Life Behind American Beauty

  • April 20, 2025

“Death is the mother of beauty.” – Wallace Stevens “I choose the ugly as well as the beautiful, knowing it will all be beautiful soon enough.” – Marvin Bell *[…]

Directors · Drama · Religion & Spirituality

0

The Secret of Creativity: The Inspirations of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed

  • April 15, 2025

“That’s the secret of creativity. You have to steal around. If you keep going back to that same 7-Eleven, they’re going to catch you. So you go over to the[…]

Horror

0

Day of the Dead, a Woman’s Nightmare, and Post-Capitalist Possibilities

  • April 10, 2025

Instead of a shape-shifting alien that overtakes its human hosts, capitalism is represented in Romero’s film by the military and to a lesser extent, the zombies. Zombies have long been[…]

Animals · Essays

0

On Electrocuting an Elephant and Animal Death in Film

  • April 5, 2025

The death of the animal allows for an altering of the visual dynamic that is often inaccessible through traditional mechanisms of film, and, through harnessing and disrupting the tenuous balance[…]

Music & Musicals

0

Last Play: All of the Surviving Footage of the Beatles’ February 10, 1967 “A Day in the Life” Session

  • March 30, 2025

We watch, and it feels like anything could happen at a session that doubled as once-in-a-zeitgeist party, with Beatles, a host of rock luminaries – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Donovan,[…]

Directors · Essays · Experimental & Underground · French Cinema

0

Forever Alex: Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me (C’est pas moi, 2024)

  • March 24, 2025

Carax suggests that the constant availability of images as immaterial streams – reduced to binary code and accessible through handheld devices – has diminished their impact. One of the film’s[…]

Actors & Personalities · Drama · Westerns · Women in Film

0

Tea in Monument Valley: On Vera Miles and The Searchers

  • March 17, 2025

An excerpt from Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away, to be released March 25 by University Press of Kentucky, exploring Miles’s impressive career and her relationships with the[…]

Alcoholism · Drama

0

Leaving Las Vegas Turns 30: A Savior-Less Portrait of Liquor-Soaked Love and Despair Not for the Faint of Heart

  • March 11, 2025

“I don’t know if I started drinking ‘cause my wife left me or my wife left me ‘cause I started drinking but fuck it anyway.” – Ben Sanderson, Leaving Las[…]

Actors & Personalities · Drama · Essays

0

In Magnolia, Tom Cruise Far Outperformed Real-Life Andrew Tate

  • March 6, 2025

Cruise’s performance as Mackey offers a unique opportunity to make sense of a Tate, and to see what all really lies right under the surface of this ongoing phenomenon. *[…]

Actors & Personalities

0

Claudette Colbert, Director?

  • February 28, 2025

The untold story of how the screen comedy queen of the 1930s and ‘40s nearly become one of very few women to direct feature films in postwar Hollywood. * *[…]

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