Blood, Sweat, and Canvas: How Barton Fink Can Set You Free
“All the world’s a hell ten feet square”
Category: Comedy
Who Do You Love? Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game Reconsidered
Was Le Grande Jean too soft on the aristos?
The Double Standard: The Twins of Two-Faced Woman and Sylvia Scarlett
“She is both sentimental and shameless.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Silents
Looking at Charlie – the Mutuals: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“Love backed by force, forgiveness sweet, brings hope and peace to Easy Street” “Fulfilling my contract with Mutual was, I suppose, the happiest period of my life.” Charlie Chaplin had[…]
Comedy · DVD & Blu-ray · Pre-Code
Dinner Is Served: The Return of MGM’s Witty ’30s Romp
Cukor’s all-star gala remains a tasty dish
No Cellos, Please, I’m American: Mike Nichols’ Closer Is Haute Merde
All glitz and no guts
“If I were different, maybe things could be the same, only different.” Leo McCarey’s Screwball Classic The Awful Truth on DVD
Cary Grant and Irene Dunne live our dreams
Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Revisiting Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue
Mixing it up with Otto and Alfred (Kinsey, that is)
Welcome to the Chest Club: Tina Fey’s Mean Girls
Freaks and Geeks redux
Forgotten Master: The Career of Gregory La Cava
Lubitsch wasn’t the only one with a “touch”
Comedy · Drama · Music & Musicals
The Masked and Anonymous Carnival of Disappointment, Exploitation, and Profound Ironies
“We’re all trying to kill time, but time ends up killing us.”
Down with Underrated Masterpieces! Looney Tunes: Back in Action and Down with Love
The sound of no hands clapping
Comedy · LGBT & Queer · Pre-Code
Wheeler and Woolsey Queered
The downright peculiar pleasures of pre-Code Wheeler and Woolsey
Some Bark, No Bite: The Mouse That Roared on DVD
Strangelove gets sweet
Two by Sturges: Sullivan’s Travels and The Lady Eve on DVD
Criterion serves up two more deep-dish DVDs from yesteryear Sullivan’s Travels (1941) Hollywood’s self-exams are usually dipped in acid: What Price Hollywood?, A Star is Born, Sunset Boulevard, The Bad[…]
Frederic March and Carole Lombard Find Nothing Sacred in the Big Apple
“There she is, in all her beads and ribbons!” How Manhattan is Nothing Sacred? To be more Manhattan, it would have to be Manhattan. Because once more we’re on that[…]
Recalling the Dream of Parenthood in Raising Arizona
Of babynappings and bodily fluids, Coens and Kubricks In Raising Arizona (1987), a blatantly obscure graffiti can be seen in the lavatory wall behind escaped convicts, Hale and Evelle (John[…]
Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire on DVD
The longest episode of foreplay in cinema history? Pierre Louys’ novel The Woman and the Puppet, first published in 1898, has been a popular source for cinema, with at least[…]
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