Lady Bird, Lady Bird, What the Heck Are You?
The internal structure of Lady Bird is, I think, unconsciously designed to evoke the monster mother and then deflect the daughterly hostility she provokes by turning things around to insist,[…]
Category: Drama
Activist & Political · Drama · Essays
Beatriz at Dinner: Eating Up the Whole World
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · SF & Fantasy
A Fine Romance? On Call Me by Your Name
As in romance novels, the excitement of sexual provocation is the heart of the story. It occupies two-thirds of the film: “His finger brushed mine” developed in fifteen stages. The[…]
Biopic · Directors · Drama · Experimental & Underground
James Franco’s The Disaster Artist: Hollywood Caught in the Act of Kissing Its Own Ass
“Hollywood oddballs are like everything else in Hollywood. Don’t look too close.” * * * Greg Sestero’s now reasonably famous book The Disaster Artist, co-written by Tom Bissell, is much[…]
Drama · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
I am Blade Runner 2049, Blade Runner 2049 is I
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the window pane. I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I Lived on, flew on,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Boxcars, Beery, and a Dutch Bob: William Wellman’s Beggars of Life (1928) on Blu-ray
What we see in Brooks and Beery on the screen is a mixup of the actors’ hardwired personalities and those contrived for their roles, but this is the sort of[…]
Wonderstruck II: Todd Haynes’ Places of Discovery and Wonder
Wonderstruck seems a retreat from some of Haynes’ established themes, in that it’s not set in the fifties and, as a PG-rated, child-oriented adventure film, instead pursues the marvelous and[…]
Wonderstruck I: Synchronizing the Heart with the Eyes
Haynes spares us slack-jawed bug-eyed Spielbergian reactions shots, but he also denies us deep emotional engagement. The visuals shadow and overwhelm the actors as they wander the bustling Haynes-Selznick landscapes.[…]
Drama · Essays · Uncategorized
Running, Reeling, Floating Free – On Hidden Figures, Humanity and Paper Balloons, City Streets
Isn’t something less reassuring and a lot more interesting going on – something more inclusive, diverse, and genuinely universal? * * * There are still too many human beings on[…]
Drama · Memoir · Religion & Spirituality · Women in Film
On the Trail and Off the Grid: The Gender of Wild in Wild and Into the Wild
Both protagonists undertake a kind of “work of the self,” whereby they simultaneously come to terms with trauma – in one case, paternal betrayal, in the other, maternal abandonment by[…]
Watch It Again! Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
Peckinpah’s ethics and form are evinced best in his sixth film, Straw Dogs, where we also discover the key to his aesthetic of violence. David Sumner takes a sabbatical to Yorkshire,[…]
Watch It Again! Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)
Trainspotting has been criticized as “pro-drug” for its flighty and pictorial depictions of heroin use, but I don’t think that’s even an issue. The grimy mundanity of the world surrounding[…]
Watch It Again! Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Hitchcock’s one-word titles have never been so instructive. Psycho is the feeling of being preyed on by your self, as by one of Norman’s stuffed birds. It is the primal[…]
Biopic · Drama · Essays · TV & Streaming
Video Killed the Video Star: Antonio Campos’s Christine (2016) and Film’s Continued Struggle to Expose Television
“In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts,’ and in living color, you are going to see another first – attempted suicide.” –[…]
Dispatch from Tribeca: Keep the Change (Rachel Israel, 2017, world premiere)
Keep the Change does something unusual, casting actors on the autism spectrum to play autistic roles. The strategy is already a success in its first outing – the film just[…]
Activist & Political · Counterculture · Crime · Drama
Watch It Again! Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970)
The counterculture and the reactionaries are equally problematic in John G. Avildsen’s complex, underrated Joe. With its bitter, murderous white males at the center blaming their, and the world’s, ills on marginalized groups[…]
The Searcher: James Gray’s The Lost City of Z (2016)
Much of The Lost City of Z is genuinely gripping, in part because the hardships and horrors it depicts are presented so matter-of-factly. A tribe of hostile natives, who at first[…]
Another Layer Under the Skin (2013): Racial Empathy and Self-Knowledge
Our failures of understanding may express themselves as prejudicial disregard of others of a different color, race, religion, or gender. From this vantage, the film invites the viewer to reflect[…]
Black Soil: Ixcanul (Jayro Bustamante, 2015)
And some are pretty enough / And some are poor indeed; And now again the people / Call it but a weed. – Alfred Lord Tennyson. “The Flower” * * *[…]
Crime · Drama · Thrillers & Action
Watch It Again! The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sweden, 2009)
This article inaugurates a new department at Bright Lights, revisiting a film from the past that is being given new life through a new release or a different medium, in[…]
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