Actors & Personalities · Books
“I’m not a star, I’m a woman, and I want to get fucked!” A combination clotheshorse/workhorse, Kay Francis made 67 films from 1929 to 1946. Her life and career are a splurging[…]
This one’s got it all, including the kitchen sink Kurosawa’s cinema is large in every sense of the word. He often spent a year or more on preparation, sometimes had[…]
Directors · Music & Musicals · Producers & Studios · Reviews
Come and meet those dancing feet, and pianos, and buildings, and . . . Give the nearest Warner Home Video executive a big hug. The company has at last remastered[…]
On the madness of Dr. Gene When I was a child and life was simple, one of my favorite forms of entertainment on the dawn of a dreary Sunday morning[…]
“Godard 24 times per second” “I need a day to tell the history of a second, a year to tell the history of a minute, a lifetime to tell the[…]
Glory Road? Make that Dead End. The first time I knew race was more of an influence than a seven-foot center was when I went to support the Villanova basketball team[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
It’s Bert and Harry, together again! Why are you not excited? Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby are not names to conjure with, unless you’re excessively fond of conjuring, but back[…]
Turning “the male gaze” on men It’s true that seeing Rock Hudson surrounded by able-bodied women is fun. In Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964) he’s blocked — trapped in a “stoic”[…]
Actors & Personalities · Genres
All movies have the potential to become a non-movie, particularly when the movie showcases a cause, a disease, a celebrity, an actor’s virtuosity, a play or musical. The movie becomes[…]
Documentaries · Visual Artists
“All there is to do now is scream.” One view of “outsider art” is that it’s often the product of a hyper-productive, typically male naif who’s closer to his own[…]
Bwaaaaah! There’s a whole new wave of sensitive guy films emerging in the last few years, a wave that finally begins to recede (hopefully) with the stunning failure of Cameron[…]
“In a single bold stroke, Ruiz films the novel according to the play of images, feelings, scents, and tastes that Marcel experiences.” 1. An attempt to film Proust’s Remembrance of[…]
Cinema’s supreme pictorialist surrenders to “the cop on the beat” Wallace Beery was always a strange case. An outstanding character actor throughout the silent era and the early sound period,[…]
“Who doesn’t want to be rescued by their narrator?” Sometimes a film’s camera takes you on one track, while its music sends you on another, wider one: it offers you[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Silents
“I was never young, and if you were never young, how can you ever feel old?” Towards the end of Follow Me, Boys! (1966), a particularly obnoxious piece of Walt[…]
“Just put your sneakers on and go. Go on the journey.” New York native Barbara Kopple has been a vital and socially progressive voice in documentary filmmaking for the past[…]
SF & Fantasy · Visual Artists · Writers & Critics
“The more you’re able to project your own world upon the work, the more power it has.” Peter Chung is not your average sci-fi figure. First, he cuts a studied[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · Silents
The last of the great silent clowns now on DVD “Step Right Up and Call Me Speedy!” Harold Lloyd has often — too often, really — been called the Anthony[…]
Reviews · TV & Streaming · Writers & Critics
“Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?” Hamlet, it must be said, is not[…]
“Nothing is so transient as sanity and safety . . .” Free from his past and sufficiently angry to wage war, Germain enlists Vorzet’s talents as psychiatrist — he believes[…]
