African American · Directors · Interviews
A Quiet Storm: Charles Burnett on Namibia and His Post-Killer of Sheep Career
“Each film requires for me its own approach.”
Category: Artists
Directors · Interviews · LGBT & Queer · Memoir
Man with a Movie Camera: Visiting Jonathan Caouette
“I could somehow control my own story.”
Directors · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Interviews
What’s Up, Docs? Nonstandard Operating Procedures in Recent Documentaries, and Interviews with Patricio Henriquez and Doug Pray
“Why didn’t you just stick to the truth?”
Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
Bowling for America: Robert Warshow, There Will Be Blood, and the Topography of Desire
“The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist. But the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.”
Directors · Festivals & Awards · Interviews
From a Line of Ancestors: Talking with Doris Dörrie and Natasha Arthy
“We in the West trample on them.”
Festivals & Awards · Writers & Critics
Twenty-One Years in the Midday Sun: Revisiting Roger Ebert’s Cannes
Here’s lookin’ at you, Roger
Dream Documents of Civil War: Three Films by Miklós Jancsó
“Jancsó’s controlled aesthetic acts as a dissonance that vibrates expressively with scenes of violence, torture, and shame.”
Crime · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Critics Cornered: On Reviewers’ Reactions to David Ayres’ Street Kings
“Anyone who speaks unsanitized thought is going to lose.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Interviews
Birds Do It, Bees Do It: Isabella Rossellini Talks About Bug Sex, Human Sex, and Green Porno
“A laugh and information!”
Happy 100th Birthday Bette
Bette Davis would have been a hundred this past Saturday, and over on her indispensible Sunset Gun, Kim Morgan celebrates via a round-up of some of diva Davis’s most bad-ass[…]
The Epic Actor – Charlton Heston (1923-2008)
To see Charlton Heston in person was to realize that some people are born to be movie stars. He had a larger-than-life presence on-screen. And off-screen as well. In 1980,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code
Miriam Hopkins & the Pre-Code Menage-a-trois
Imagine Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston deciding to live together and share Brad Pitt! How hot would that be? But no, now we live in a much more (as in[…]
Favorite Screenwriting Device No. 42 – The Sympathetic Listener
Much has been written about the scene in There Will Be Blood in which Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) confesses his innermost feelings to his purported half-brother, Henry Brands (Kevin J.[…]
Rebel, Rebel: Gregg Araki Reflects on The Living End and His Totally F***ed Up Career at Sundance 2008
“My whole thing, all my life, was march to your own drummer.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Peter Watkins and the Politics of Expression: On Edvard Munch (1974) and The Freethinker (1994)
“Watkins’ filmmaking bravely seeks an insistence on personal truth his own and the viewer’s.”
Wes’s World: Riding Wes Anderson’s Vision Limited
Paging crackle, energy, and wit. Come in, please.
Actors & Personalities · Essays
Presence and Absence: Toward a Working Conception of Screen Characters
“A basic consistency on the actor’s part remains uniquely convincing as character, no matter how simplistic that character’s definition.”
Nuts to the Squirrels and Roués Redeemed: The Discreet Charm of Charles Boyer
“In Boyer, self-belief and theatrical technique are seamlessly fused together.”
Composers · Essays · Music & Musicals · Sound & Language · Writers & Critics
False Consonance and False Consciousness: Contrarian Notes on the Ideology of Film Music
“Defenseless against music, I must submit to its despotism and, depending on its whim, be god or garbage.”
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