Gary Morris founded Bright Lights Film Journal as a print publication in 1974; it became a web-only magazine in 1996. He is the author of the monograph Roger Corman (Twayne Publishers, 1985) and the editor of Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran (Anthem Press, 2009). Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews · Visual Artists
The love in this film about the two lost boys of Eurotrash art is mostly self-love. The art of Pierre and Gilles, affectionately known as P&G, has always been a[…]
Harvey Keitel: The Art of Darkness. The Unauthorized Biography, by Marshall Fine. New York: Fromm International, 1998. ISBN 0-88064-191-6, Cloth, 272pp, $25.00. Harvey Keitel, as rendered by film critic Marshall[…]
That’s Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960, by Henry T. Sampson. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8108-3250-X, Hardcover library binding (no dust jacket), 249pp, $60.00. Scarecrow Press[…]
The Vampire Gallery: A Who’s Who of the Undead, by J. Gordon Melton. Farmington Hills, MI: Visible Ink Press (a division of Gale Research), 1998. ISBN 1-57859-053-1, Trade paper, 500pp, $19.95. J.[…]
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
When gender gets in the way, as it so often does, these gender pioneers say “Change it!” Trannies of every stripe — drag queens and kings, transsexuals, intersexuals, etc. —[…]
This beloved film artist was driven as much by self-doubt as by his belief in the power of the “little man” The rise of Frank Capra from sickly, abused, impoverished[…]
An arresting look at the limited lives of four New York singles, playing themselves British director Nicholas Barker’s New York cult hit Unmade Beds has an unintended effect that will[…]
Even the cinematic frame isn’t safe from Sokurov’s grim sleight-of-hand Painterliness in cinema has its pitfalls. Filmmakers like Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman built careers on bringing visual imagery familiar[…]
Watch out for that “placid surface.” Movies based on plays don’t always fare well in the transition. There’s a double danger here: slavishly recreating the “stage experience” in its often[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
The supreme masterpiece of the poetic documentary form Three recent views of Cuba: the repressive, fragmented, poverty-stricken last gasp of modern Communism offered by the U.S. media; the wonderland of[…]
Thanhouser produced 1,000+ titles between 1909 and 1917, but less than 200 survive. Silent cinema is often written off, even by cinephiles who pride themselves on their intimate knowledge of[…]
LGBT & Queer · Reviews · Visual Artists
Timid top George Dyer meets pushy bottom Francis Bacon, with art and death the inevitable result In a typical moment in this artful biopic of Francis Bacon, the ultra-queer painter[…]
Comedy · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
The seminal trash classic all dressed up with somewhere to go Cinema, like any art form, has its milestones — the first “story film” in The Great Train Robbery (1903),[…]
Horror · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Monsters and drag queens and dykes — oh my! After decades of being devalued by lousy prints on video and television, Universal’s classic ’30s horror films have been resurrected, refurbished,[…]
“Fairy tales, unlike any other form of literature, direct the child to discover his identity and calling, and they also suggest what experiences are needed to develop his character further.” –[…]
The roots of artistry are often sought in autobiography, and for filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi, this seems an especially appropriate place to start. Mizoguchi, with Ozu and Kurosawa one of the three undisputed masters from[…]
As if radically rethinking the Hollywood cartoon weren’t enough, our boy Tex can also be thanked for inventing or perfecting Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and perhaps the greatest character in[…]
Film historians have made much, and rightly so, of the enormous influence of 1930s German and Austrian émigrés on the American film scene and by extension on American culture in[…]
The ultimate in queenly revenge as an obese ugly duckling becomes a sleek, sophisticated homo The fairy tale about the ugly duckling who turns into a swan gets the gay[…]
Again Hollywood cheats on the issue of two men kissing – when are they going to get it right? In the past few years, two distinct trends have dominated gay[…]
