At War with Myself: A Word with Lars von Trier at Cannes 2005
On Manderley and more Most directors at Cannes you can meet at their hotels lining the boardwalk, for a Perrier and an interview. Not Lars von Trier, the director of[…]
Category: Artists
Directors · Interviews · LGBT & Queer
The Kid Behind the Camera: Chatting Up Darren Stein
Put the Camera on Me‘s queer wunderkind speaks I first saw Put the Camera on Me at the 2003 San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, and wrote about[…]
The Human (Tragi)Comedy: Talking to Arnaud Desplechin
Of Kings and Queen and other subjects I met with Arnaud Desplechin in New York last April before a sneak preview of Kings and Queen at the BAMcinématek in Brooklyn.[…]
The Disturbance of the Real: Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen
How real is the director’s much-vaunted “multilayered depiction of reality”? The question is, does it frighten you more that your congenial neighbor – the one whose house has the hummingbird[…]
Thinking (and Talking) It Through: Arnaud Desplechin and Kings and Queen
“Is there anything more dazzling than the possible?” Sophisticated, high-spirited, and unpredictable, Arnaud Desplechin might be likened to a raffish, Gallic Woody Allen – the comedic aspects and neurotic energy[…]
Pulp with a Soundtrack: Getting Elmore Leonard on Film
“My sound is the absence of me.” – Elmore Leonard The curious thing about Elmore Leonard is that while his books move fast, the films that capture his tone seem[…]
Superwomen? The Bad-Ass Babes of Sin City – or Are They?
This noir-drenched comic adaptation is retro in more ways than one In the sordid, febrile netherworld of Sin City, the eponymous film re-creation of the comic by Frank Miller, the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Silents
Looking at Charlie – the Mutuals: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“Love backed by force, forgiveness sweet, brings hope and peace to Easy Street” “Fulfilling my contract with Mutual was, I suppose, the happiest period of my life.” Charlie Chaplin had[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors
Shadow Man: On Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby, the Coming Together and the Falling Apart
What’s inside those “sculpted spaces of dark intimacy”
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Hooker with a Heart of Darkness: Jane Fonda in Klute
Bree Daniels trumps all Fonda’s real-life characters
Class Dismissed: Revisiting Losey and Pinter’s Misunderstood Masterpiece, The Servant
They also serve who only stand and annihilate
Sirk and the Critics
(above) The happy-go-lucky “Sirk ensemble” from All That Heaven Allows: Russell Metty, Agnes Moorehead, Sirk, Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Ross Hunter, and dialogue director Jack Davis.
God Is Dead, or Through a Glass Darkly: On Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession
Jon Halliday’s indispensable Sirk on Sirk has confirmed what Sirk’s admirers and students had long suspected: that his films are not all equally “personal,” and that he had a much[…]
Two Weeks in Another Town: Interview with Douglas Sirk
Introduction (Jane Stern) There are more drugstores in Lugano, Switzerland than in any other town in Europe. They are small cliniques, filled with Jacuzzi pumps, sitz bath salts, pine oil[…]
Introduction to Bright Lights’ Douglas Sirk Issue
This is our first issue dedicated to a single director. Douglas Sirk was the logical choice. While not exactly a household word himself, some of his films were among the[…]
Love Affairs That Always Fade: Sirk’s Doomed Romances
In Douglas Sirk’s world, romantic love doesn’t play much of a part. His characters are boxed into ruts which are ever-deepening; they cannot understand themselves or their desperate predicaments, let[…]
Sarris on Sirk
The very strange, controversial career of Douglas Sirk raises perplexing questions about form and content in the cinema. For one thing, Sirk’s literary source material has ranged from Anton Chekhov[…]
Zuckerman and Zugsmith on Sirk
GEORGE ZUCKERMAN ON SIRK Robert Wilder’s novel had been shelved and written off (because of Breen office objections and a threatened lawsuit by the Reynolds tobacco family) when I first[…]
Animation · Animators · Interviews
“It’s Amazing I’ve Survived”: An Interview with Bill Plympton
“The football game where the chicken mascot runs around crazy with an erection was inspired by a story that someone told me…”
What Is Love? Mania Akbari Talks About Life, Love, and 20 Angosht (20 Fingers)
This first-time director from Iran inspires cheers and controversy
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