Activist & Political · Counterculture · Crime · Drama
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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
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[…]
Today, Cukor’s musical version is regarded as a classic, and, due to Garland’s spectacular comeback performance, it has even eclipsed the original. Yet I prefer the 1937 version, primarily because[…]
Almost as if stolen from the time of the usual commitments of any working person engaged with the world, these images breathe a second, more intimate, rhythm into Paterson and[…]
“Through the infinite reaches of space, the problems of man seem trivial and naïve indeed, and man existing alone seems himself an episode of little consequence … The Earth will[…]
The whole film can be viewed as a consciousness-raising of sorts. While even new-wave French auteurs fall into predictable madeleine-inspired memory spirals riffing on (not to put too fine a point[…]
The truth is that they tend toward philosophical absurdism, rather than nihilism, and this perspective is what either makes or breaks their film in terms of commercial appeal. The draw,[…]
His Girl Friday’s headlong pace feels like that of modern life, and its rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue calls to mind our modern media babble, with innumerable people around the globe and[…]
Regret is perhaps Payne’s greatest theme. The continual human dramedy, the elegiac comedy, a country full of people with limited potential raised to think everyone is special, confined souls struggling[…]
I have yet to encounter anybody who feels my fierce outrage at Scottie’s unfairness toward the necklace. That object is all-important, not because it is the vital clue to the Madeleine-is-Judy[…]
Comedy · Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
From his very beginnings as a filmmaker, Griffith understood the efficacy of location shooting. Putting actors into real landscapes and streets not only went to authenticating the narrative but had[…]
Directors · Drama · Interviews
Editor’s note: This is the second director interview by our correspondent Amir Ganjavie, this one conducted at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival. The film discussed, My Mother, is being released in the U.S.[…]
Dreams and Pistol Shots * * * From Leslie Halliwell to David Thomson, capsule reviews of Hitchcock’s Spellbound have made sure we know that the psychiatry on offer is pure[…]
Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
Today (July 20) is Cormac McCarthy’s birthday. He’s 83. We send birthday wishes his way by reposting Sophia Nguyen’s persuasive discussion of McCarthy and the book/film of The Counselor, which[…]
The common theme of these films is the peculiar connection between women and animals, and their shared devaluation in a hierarchical, male-dominated structure. It is, after all, not a coincidence[…]
Activist & Political · Drama · Essays · War · Writers & Critics
The response to The Deer Hunter amounted to a serious public debate over the Vietnam War that extended beyond film critics to engage a wide range of viewers. It wasn’t[…]
The Color Wheel has been criticized in some circles for having an improvisatory and unfocused structure, yet all the film’s major thematic concerns are explicitly introduced in its compact pre-credit[…]
