Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“Heaven rest us, I’m not asbestos” Roberta is one of the least known,1 and one of the very best, of the films that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did together. It features some of[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
SuperRuss speaks! I interviewed Russ Meyer in 1974 at his office in Los Angeles. He answered the door himself, dressed in red jockey shorts with a strip of film dangling over his[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Western Civ gets a brutal debunking courtesy of this South African expat auteur The titles of Ian Kerkhof’s films are both seduction and warning about what to expect from the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
New York’s pioneering campmeister’s flame still sears Not long ago, Fran Lebowitz invoked the sad-comic image of a sailor disembarking in New York, heading to Times Square, and experiencing total[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
The master of Super-8 radical cinema takes us into the cave of the unknown, with extraordinary results The Super-8 camera and projector were once the beloved means by which postwar[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Julia Roberts has tits! It’s a well-known fact that Julia Roberts can turn the world on with her smile. When she puts her whole bod into it, the very heavens start to[…]
The later masterworks of one of cinema’s titans in fine VHS transfers Film has always been considered something of a mongrel art form, inherently populist and therefore of dubious aesthetic[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Liberated porn queen or psychological wreck? You be the judge. In a demimonde as duplicitous as the porn world, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find that some of its players[…]
Hitch’s – and by now the whole damn culture’s – seminal Oedipal nightmare revisited Read the companion photo essay “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone”[…]
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
Dogme secrets revealed by Lars von Trier’s “most promising actress” The 17th International Short Films Festival of Aix en Provence, in December 1999, apart from the competition, focused on Scandinavian[…]
Making art in the most unlikely circumstances Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) was one of many beneficiaries of the wave of auteurism that galvanized critics in France in the 1950s and[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Plan 9 from Outer Space; Glen or Glenda; Jail Bait; Bride of the Monster One of my fondest memories of a communal movie experience is seeing my first Ed Wood[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
Fun in the New World Corman founded New World in 1970; it was his second attempt to control production and distribution (after the ill-fated Film Group, which lasted a couple[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
Ecstasy for all! says the pied piper of queer experimental film Every movement has its muses. James Broughton probably would have copped to being a muse, or perhaps more accurately,[…]
Composers · Music & Musicals · SF & Fantasy
Serling’s groundbreaking series was also a warm haven for Hollywood’s greatest composer Last weekend I purchased the Herrmann Twilight Zone double-CD, and I’ve played it about ten times by now[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Producers & Studios · Reviews
The beloved low-budget exploitation company sampled New World Pictures (1970-1983) was the brainchild of Roger Corman. It was his second attempt (after The Filmgroup in the early ’60s) to run[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Forget all those other boring indie brother teams – these guys were the original geniuses of cinema’s bargain basement. The sudden death, disappearance, or withdrawal of a key actor during[…]
The Master speaks on life, art, and Carlos Castaneda Federico Fellini’s fantasy world, which has become more dreamlike over the years, shows us the spectacle of life. Yet, paradoxically, the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“Hey fella, twirl that old propella” Hollywood producer Merriam Cooper loved three things: airplanes, the tropics, and giant gorillas.1 In Flying Down to Rio, Cooper’s 1933 airborne musical, he went[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Three pioneering American neorealist indies: Little Fugitive, Weddings and Babies, Lovers and Lollipops “The concept of making the film almost unnoticed among crowds seemed to be working.” – Morris Engel, on[…]
