John Barrymore: Sweet Prince of Irony
“Isn’t it extraordinary that the most popular character ever written should apparently be defeated by life instead of transcending it?”
Category: Artists
Literature and Film · Thrillers & Action · Writers & Critics
Six Ways of Looking at Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
A master of the spy novel whose work inspired some of the most memorable films of the genre, John le Carré died on December 12, 2020. We honor him with[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Historical & Epic · Politics
Looking at Charlie — Modern Times (An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin)
Charlie Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889. To honor the old boy, we herewith present Alan Vanneman’s witty discussion of one of Charlie’s masterpieces, originally published in Bright Lights[…]
Books · Directors · Women in Film
Book review: Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure
Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). The Coppola who emerges from Rogers’s study is therefore something of a double agent. On[…]
Genres · Horror · Producers & Studios
Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton: Looking Back at a B-Movie Master
Producer Val Lewton died on this day (March 14) in 1951, age 46. We honor this visionary talent by reposting this profile of Lewton by frequent BLFJ contributor Mark Vieira,[…]
Comedy · Literature and Film · Theory · Writers & Critics
Whodunit? Poe and Dr. Strangelove
The oblique reference to Poe by means of the double POE acronyms, then, can be seen as linking the fundamental prophecy of Dr. Strangelove with the much earlier secular prophecies[…]
Directors · Theory · Writers & Critics
“Letting the contemporary run through you”: The Film Criticism of Olivier Assayas
One of Assayas’s most ferocious articles he ever wrote (and also one of the most theoretical) attacks le cinéma publicitaire – a film aesthetic (associated in France with Jean-Jacques Beineix[…]
Trevor Howard: “The World Doesn’t Make Any Heroes”
” In between the idealized lover and the cantankerous old goat lay a handful of roles in which Howard managed to simultaneously embody and undermine the archetypal Englishman.”
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Memoir · Outsiders
Obscene and Obscure Longings: The Video Diaries of George Kuchar and Carl J. Sukenick
As much as there remains some graspable appeal to each man’s video work – George’s comic personality and the humorous reckoning with his own legacy, and Carl’s peculiar brand of[…]
Dana Andrews: The Forties Hero and His Shadow
“It’s not difficult for me to hide emotion, since I’ve always hidden it in my personal life.”
Actors & Personalities · Asian
“From Slumdog to Heartthrob”: Dev Patel’s Journey in Hollywood So Far
The next step for a Hollywood that is coming to see the true potential of Dev Patel’s abilities is to let him shine in his own right, and in his[…]
5 Greatest Films Never Made: From Gifford/Coppola to Wurlitzer to Faulkner/Orwell
By all accounts The Drop Edge of Yonder, or Zebulon as the script was titled, was truly one-of-a-kind, going way beyond the acid-western genre Wurlitzer helped create. In part we[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian
Japanese Cinema’s Uncommon Man: Tatsuya Nakadai’s Dissidents, Outcasts, and Shadow Warriors
“Like Hollywood’s new postwar men, he offered a multifaceted, ambivalent masculinity far from monolithic wartime ideals.”
Actors & Personalities · Books · Characters · Hollywood
Books: Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, by David Lazar
David Lazar, Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, October 2020) * * * I’d have to say that the best definition[…]
Drama · Theory · Writers & Critics
André Bazin and Graham Greene (and Alfred Hitchcock): Some Points of Contact
Bazin would always harbor reservations about The Third Man, but, due to that film, Greene’s presence would continue to loom large in discussions of Orson Welles, who was, of course,[…]
Books · Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Women in Film
Her Incantatory Voice: Barbara Rubin and Christmas on Earth
From the same desert, toward the same dark sky, my tired eyes open on the silver star, forever; but the Three Wise Men never stir, the Kings of life, the[…]
Troubling Mastery: Scorsese’s and Kubrick’s Psychosexual New York Odysseys
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position. – W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux-Arts” (1940) “It’s also a film I cherish[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Memoir
Adagio: Phil Solomon on His Life as an Artist
“I’ve always been interested in the idea of cinema and loss, the beautiful and poignant conjuring of human presence and its absence. It’s an illusion, we know that, and yet[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Cinematographers · Interviews · War
The Greater Symphony: Talking with Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel about Da 5 Bloods
When I take on a project, one of the first things I try to do is get an idea of the overarching tone the director is looking for. Then I[…]
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?” Carol Reed, Graham Greene, and The Third Man
If Harry, viewed through the lens of Greene’s perverse Catholicism, is some kind of dark Jesus, then Holly is his betraying Judas, and Anna is his Magdalene. Both Harry and[…]
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