Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama · Essays · Romance
QT’s films are commonly hurtling toward darkness, yet Once Upon feels like a repudiation, as much as a culmination, of his oeuvre. There’s a point in the experience where the[…]
As part of their liberation from convention, Corman empowers female characters with choices both real and metaphorical. Even a common love triangle can represent female empowerment, with the choice between[…]
Actors & Personalities · Hollywood
INTRODUCTION Jean Harlow (1911-1937), born Harlean Carpenter, rose to screen fame in the early 1930s playing characters with an unaffected, uninhibited, spontaneous sexuality. [See Figure 1.] Dubbed the “Platinum Blonde”[…]
Actors & Personalities · Commentary · Silents
Those who affect a superior attitude toward a great artist such as Lillian Gish are not only ignorant of our cultural heritage but stubbornly unaware that art usually comes from[…]
Composers · Historical & Epic · Reviews · Silents
This is an updated and revised version of Gordon Thomas’s article first posted in Bright Lights in May 2006, reposted to celebrate Easter. * * * Bigger is better this[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Pre-Code
“With his impish grin, twinkling eyes, and boyish blond hair, he looks like Tom Sawyer crossed with a Tammany Hall fixer.”
Altman admitted never finishing the novel and saw no need to remain faithful to it. For that reason, the movie wasn’t well received by Chandler fans. Most didn’t appreciate the[…]
Literature and Film · Writers & Critics
The most substantial changes in Nightmare Alley are between the novel and the screenplay. For example, in the novel, Stan, who covets Zeena and her act, kills the alcoholic Pete[…]
Designers · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Queen Anne’s bed was hand built, hand carved and painted. It was 14 feet high with four mattresses and layers of beautiful bedding. The bed is a fairly accurate queen’s[…]
Hollywood was just beyond the horizon for the émigrés. There is no doubt that Curtis Bernhardt, Robert Siodmak, and Max Ophüls thought they would settle down in Paris and become[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
“The reason I sought out Betty Garrett’s book in the first place was because of something devastating that I read – and didn’t want to be true – in Farley[…]
Roma is the latest edition in what can be considered Cuarón’s prenatal trilogy, preceded by Children of Men (2006) and Gravity. This is a director obsessed with matters of pregnancy,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries
As Robert Clift states in the film: “The people in my life who loved Monty lost him twice: in his death, and then again when they couldn’t find him in[…]
Considering Mitchum’s background, it’s forgivable to conflate his cinematic existentialist tough guys with his mythic, often dubious, real-life history. Some things are certain, though: Mitchum lost his father early, crushed[…]
Animation · Animators · Experimental & Underground · Religion & Spirituality
In her two longest works of animation – Sita Sings the Blues (2008) and Seder Masochism (2018, currently on the festival circuit) – Nina Paley turns her sharp wit and[…]
Designers · Horror · Interviews
“We need guilt, Doctor. And shame.” * * * Luca Guadagnino follows up 2016’s A Bigger Splash and 2017’s Call Me by Your Name with 2018’s Suspiria, a remake of[…]
In Sparrow, this sense of melancholia manifests as an abstract nostalgia for the architecture and cultural values of an old Hong Kong that is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by[…]
Horror · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
Despite the fact that Wray had no previous screen credits, Lewton hired her to rework the story of I Walked with a Zombie with only two months to go before[…]
“There’s something that happened, and there’s a kind of ring around that event – or it’s fenced off – and everything else is okay around it, but there’s just something[…]
