On Black Book and his recent Hollywood defection Known for big-budget Hollywood vehicles like RoboCop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven had his greatest success with the white-hot erotic[…]
“I hate the idea that film is actually telling a story!” A striking division in the Cannes film festival this year: between films that offer dark, bleak (read: despairing, nihilistic)[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
It came from San Francisco This is the first of a two-part article exploring how hard-core porn evolved through the efforts of Jim and Artie Mitchell and other pioneers, with[…]
Art for [PAM]’s sake The “Perpetual Art machine” [PAM] is a new media project begun in 2005 that presents the work of a large number of video artists as pieces[…]
“People can die without love.” The boy is unloved. Magnus has the dead expression of depression as he walks around his Estonian town, stopping in on his selfish vulgar mother,[…]
“His characters have tended to be more bewildered by life and disgusted by a world that won’t cooperate.” As Jack Nicholson turns 70 (April 2007), he embodies more than ever[…]
Will the twain ever meet? Why isn’t film criticism taught by film critics in British universities? Or to put it another way; why have we never heard of those who[…]
Uncategorized · Visual Artists
Some still dispute whether Edward Gorey (1925-2000) was fundamentally an artist who wrote, or a writer who drew. Gorey was, in fact, both an accomplished writer and an accomplished artist[…]
Artists · Directors · Producers & Studios · Reviews
Give us another naked nurse and some more explosions! Roger Corman, who turned 81 in April 2007, has assured his place in the history books several times over. As fast[…]
“But I was accused of enjoying walking up and down the red carpet! Their rage knew no bounds.” Now 70, British director Ken Loach has for over 40 years made intimate, compelling,[…]
“Funny, tender, a little neurotic, a little erotic, and always spontaneous …” A Foreign Affair (1948) is a blunt Billy Wilder comedy set amid the ruins of Berlin, and it’s[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Since my esteemed Bright Lights After Dark (and Bright Lights Film Journal) co-contributor C. Jerry Kutner posted his last entry in the (now) ongoing Nutty Professor debate out here in[…]
I’d like to join Tim Lucas and others in acknowledging the passing of Freddie Francis, a fine underrated director and one of the greatest of English cinematographers. He deservedly won[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
In a comment to my previous Jerry Lewis post, Tom Sutpen wrote: Couldn’t agree more . . . except . . . Jerry Lewis has always steadfastly denied any Martin[…]
In four films, two for Alfred Hitchcock (Rope {1948} and Strangers on a Train {1951}), one for Nicholas Ray (They Live by Night {1948}) and one for Luchino Visconti (Senso[…]
That Obscure Agent of Misanthropy? Un Chien Andalou (1929), the “surrealist masterpiece” made in collaboration with Salvador Dali was, in one sense, a new sugar-free version of Rene Clair’s original[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian
“The women of To’s world are not just endearingly kooky, but often unacceptably bizarre and amoral in their excited reactions to events.” Five years ago, I was starting to think[…]
“Never mind that Hudson was a gay man playing a straight man playing a gay man in love with a man who was really a woman.” Universal Studio, never in[…]
