Directors · Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
Where Reid spends pages and pages absentmindedly ruminating on the many very painful, and very human, distinctions between Self and Other before losing himself in a tonal mess of relationship[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Impresarios & Moguls
Mom and Dad is likely the most successful exploitation movie ever, and it still offers a lesson in the facts of, well, not life but canny American entrepreneurialism, that is,[…]
Drama · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
Graham Greene could be a very political writer (nowhere more than in The Quiet American, which was his next major work after The End of the Affair), but Christianity has[…]
Directors · Gender · Hollywood · Horror · Men & Masculinity
If the sum of Spielberg’s work is about how men live in the world, Jaws is his most particular point on the subject, a film centered with almost fantastical totality[…]
Lester D. Friedman. Citizen Spielberg. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. $24.95. Calling him “our foremost practitioner of reel American history,” Friedman draws our attention to Spielberg’s determination[…]
#MeToo · Animation · Animators · News · Production History · Societal Trends
Docter and Lasseter were part of the Pixar Braintrust, a group of aging white men that held creative control of Pixar’s productions. The original members – Lasseter, Docter, Andrew Stanton[…]
Costume Drama · Designers · Drama · Fashion · Melodrama · Photo Essays · Romance
In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous. – Elsa Schiaparelli * * * Edgar G. Ulmer’s Her Sister’s Secret was released to theaters the same year as Mitchell Leisen’s To[…]
David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation, edited by Matthew Sorrento and David Ryan. 259 pp. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2022. 2007 was a good year for American film, with[…]
The unfinished projects to which Welles devoted his energies began in July 1961. This was exactly twenty-five years after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the year in which[…]
Actors & Personalities · Dance · Dancers · Hollywood · Music & Musicals
He is transfixing just walking across the screen in his first movie, Dancing Lady (1933), where he partners Joan Crawford and looks as if he could fly if he wanted[…]
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
“Hard times will make a monkey eatred peppers.”
“Steve understood real people, particularly misfits, like nobody else.It was just the Hollywood brass he loathed.”
Drama · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
We come to find out as viewers, whether we believe in Leda’s self-governing comportment at the beginning or not, that this task of motherhood is never-ending; each work demonstrates to[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Directors
Ethan and Joel Coen have shared writing, directing, and producing credits on their collaborations until their recent hiatus from working together. Here they are on location for their 2004 comedy[…]
Comedy · Directors · Eastern European · Romance · Writers & Critics
Lubitsch biographers and critics have accepted the lore that the Hungarian plays he used for his films were inferior. That widely held perception has come about because Lubitsch’s admirers want[…]
Drama · War · Writers & Critics
The refugees’ babel is a constant background presence in Seghers’s novel, a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the various ship arrivals and departures, and spreading news of any developments[…]
Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code · Sex & Relationships · Women in Film
West is a born outlaw, a queen of the underworld who knows that two and two are four but five will get you 10 if you know how to work[…]
Directors · Drama · Outsiders · War · Writers & Critics
Rumanian refugee Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) conning a guileless California schoolteacher, Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland, in an Oscar-nominated role), into marrying him so he can enter the United States[…]
Counterculture · Directors · Drama · Interviews · Restorations
Dennis wasn’t originally hired to direct Out of the Blue, rather he was hired to act in it. After about a week of shooting, the production manager, Paul Lewis, who[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Silents · Women in Film
If she is seen simply as a free spirit, a woman who lives for sexual pleasure, and as exemplary on that account, a model liberated woman (as Louise Brooks herself[…]
