“If the silent period showed the flashes of brilliance as well as the unevenness of Barnet’s talent, the next few years would see him produce two worldwide masterpieces that place him as a precursor of French Poetic Realism and the work of Jean Renoir, as well as an influence on the French New Wave through the works of Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette.”
“Attempts to create interesting projects of any sort despite our limitations can sometimes touch us more deeply than slick illusions that — literally by design — hide a lot of skill and effort, yet, in so doing, also hide something of the crazy courage it takes just to be human.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground
“For him, film was not only a profession but a mean of investigating cinema as a language, an investigation in which theory and film practice went hand in hand.”
“Being beautiful fights trivializing and ironization by the camera; it saves the women from being regarded as cheap or inscrutable. Elegance and glamour paradoxically grant these subjects an inner life.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica
“These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”
Directors · Festivals & Awards
“Kudos to the Vegas for showing not only the grimness of hustling, but also the ordinariness. As Clemente dresses, his middle-aged, matronly partner puts on her reading glasses to count the cash.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors
“Sadly, this oversight neglects Foster’s contributions to both film noir and world cinema, and it dismisses a life nearly as fascinating as that of Welles.”
“Together with his unobstructed panorama of those mean streets, and his long relationship with religion, Scorsese’s character was shaped. It infused in him just the right amount of guilt to develop stories about the struggle between good and evil and that dangerous place in between — not bad enough for hell, not good enough for heaven.”
“Frustrated by their unrequited love, their inability to capture their objet petit a, Wong’s characters search desperately for appropriate supplements onto which they can displace their yearnings and desires.”
“The truth is that humour and terror play an equal part in his vision, which takes shape at the point where the two extremes meet.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
“Any director who shoots a grindhouse film without exquisite, triumphant, dangerous, and naked women is doing a disservice to the genre and should move into a different field.”
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries
“The wonderful paradox of the Wiseman film is that what allows the layered complexities to unfold is the leveling of everything we are shown.”
Hello Out There (1949), like virtually all of the films James Whale directed after Show Boat, had a troubled production history. It never obtained a commercial release. Yet, unlike any of[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
by Matthew Sorrento If intentional camp is bad, then camp striving to be bad is even worse. So claimed Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” and others[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
“What’s all this about good and evil?” With the release of The Great Dictator late in 1940, Charlie Chaplin had done it again. He had made a movie that, with[…]
Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
“I would very much like to attract others into my world, but my world is not the world of crowds, though the crowds have often lined up before my world.”1
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Of insular wonderlands and open cityscapes
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews
“I’d love to be Orson’s assistant again.”
Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
“We just followed the leads.”
