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.
Category: Artists
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[…]
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
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
Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Doing What Moves Them at the Moment: Five of Cassavetes’ Best on DVD
The master of improv gets his due courtesy of Criterion’s extras-laden box set
Asian · Directors · Interviews
Talking to Hirokazu Kore-eda: On Maborosi, Nobody Knows, and Other Pleasures
“I simply want to look at people as they are.”
In the Realm of Natural Transcendence: Emir Kusturica’s Life Is a Miracle
Out of the pastoral
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Interviews
“Plant Your Feet and Tell the Truth”: An Interview with Clint Eastwood
On Million Dollar Baby and a million-dollar career
Film Technology & History · Producers & Studios
“Nice town. I’ll take it.” Howard Hughes and Hollywood
A salute to the playboy entrepreneur of Tinseltown
Capra’s Corn? Dante … Dickens … Capra …
George Bailey’s wartime America looks eerily familiar
How to Murder John Williams: Toward an Ideology of Contrapuntal Antirealism
To construct musicality through expressionism, or to express musicality through constructivism?
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Blue Skies? Well, Partly Sunny
Fred ‘n’ Bing ‘n’ Irv, Part II
Norbert, We Hardly Knew Ye: Rethinking the Late German Composer
He composed “Lili Marleen” and, oh yeah, hundreds of other songs and scores
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