Producers & Studios · Writers & Critics
Talk Is Cheap: On Aaron Sorkin’s Moral Compass
“You want answers?” “I want the truth!” “You can’t handle the truth!” — A Few Good Men (1992), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
Category: Artists
Boris Barnet: The Lyric Voice in Soviet Cinema
“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.”
Young Ones and Swan Songs: Luis Bunuel in Mexico, Bela Tarr in Edinburgh
“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
A Dream That Was Not All a Dream: The Films of André Delvaux
“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.”
The Envelope of Time: Wrapping Up the Past in Chris Marker, Alexander Sokurov, and José Luis Guerín
“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.”
Greer Garson and the Good War: How We All Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great Lady
“Almost everything about Greer, her graceful figure, little mannerisms, the way she walks, talks, and smiles, reminds us of the Nineties, when Papa sat at the head of the table, airing his arrogant opinions, and never dreaming that his demure little wife, resourceful as a dozen U.S. Army engineers, was twisting him around her little finger, really running him and everything else in the house.” — Charles Samuels in Motion Picture magazine (1945)
Bodies Politic/Body Politics: The Political and the Personal in Contemporary Film Essays
“Your body is a microcosm of all existence.” — Death: A Love Story
Directors · Festivals & Awards
A Handful of Keepers: The 40th New Directors/New Films Festival
“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.”
Between Heaven and Hell: The Movies — Martin Scorsese’s Middle Ground
“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.”
Mapping the Mind Between Movies: Intertextuality in the Work of Wong Kar-wai
“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 King of Chutzpah: On the Singular Pleasures of Phil Silvers
“Silvers raised the smart-aleck, rapid-fire monolog to high art.”
Interviews · Writers & Critics
Of Time and Place: An Interview with Writer Jon Raymond on Meek’s Cutoff and HBO’s Mildred Pierce
“In Meek’s Cutoff — about a community making decisions based on limited information, confronting their own attitudes toward the unknown — it seemed appropriate that the movie would end on a moment of unknowing, incompletion.”
Deborah Kerr: An Actress in Search of an Author
“The camera goes right through the skin. The camera brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies that have never worn off their splendor.” — Peter Viertel, Kerr’s husband
Actors & Personalities · Directors
Norman, Is That You? The Long Wait of Norman Foster
“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.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica
The Complete Exile: The Films of Carlos Atanes
“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.”
For Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes)
The Down-to-Earth must know She cannot rival the Sky We move on suspended Between Reality and Dream Between Oblivion and Eternity Through a Labyrinth of Evergreens cjk 8/10/05
Liz Taylor: An Angel Makes Good
Can it be true? Has the living legend Elizabeth Taylor finally merged back into the heaven from which she came? I guess it is. I guess we’ll be seeing[…]
Campy Extraterrestrials – Michael Gough vs. Dudley Manlove
I have written before of my admiration for the late Michael Gough (1916-2011), a British actor who could move effortlessly from the serious classical theater of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Harold Pinter, and Berthold Brecht,[…]
In memoriam: Michael Gough, the Posh Spice of British horror
He brought upper crust polish with a slight hint that his life was way darker and stranger than the poshness let on…
Pariah-dise Now: Charlie Sheen and the busted bubble
“People misunderstand my passion for anger.” Charlie Sheen… was I the only film lover who saw his interview last night on 20/20 and instantly connected his monomaniacal fervor to the[…]
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