Home Is Not Just for Christmas … or Thanksgiving … or Middle-Class Chaps, However Decent
To be clear, The Holly and the Ivy is not mistakable for a lost gem from Renoir or Mizoguchi. Yet it does make the most of a story told “in[…]
Category: Drama
“Filled with Ritual”: Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited
“[B]ecause the story is filled with ritual and religion, we were always going into temples. I was particularly obsessed with participating in any religious ceremonies I could get involved with.” — Wes Anderson, on the making of The Darjeeling Limited
Religious Allegory and Cultural Discomfort in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky: And Why Larry Crowne Is One of the Best Films of 2011
“You can laugh while Rome is burning, but believe you me, Poppy, it is burning, and if you don’t wake up, then you will be burnt to a cinder . . . I mean, look around you. What do you see? Do you see a policy of bringing happiness to people?” — Scott in Happy-Go-Lucky
Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies (2010)
“There are truths that can only be revealed on condition of having been discovered.”– Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies (2003)
Activist & Political · Drama · Essays
The Illusionist: Film Art and Political Power
“He tries to trick you. I try to enlighten you. Which is the more noble pursuit?” The Illusionist was released in 2006 to generally good reviews (the consensus seemed to[…]
Crime · Drama · Exploitation & Erotica
Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom: An Introduction
Take your seats for a “dark-hearted, midnight fantasia of ecstatic sadism, voyeurism and psychosis”!
Towards a New Cinema of Castration: I Spit on Your Grave and Only Angels Have Wings
“Peer pressure is either a boon or a bitch with the power to destroy the world, or save it.”
Activist & Political · Drama · Reviews
Critical Distance: What Knowing Knows About 9/11
“Where Cloverfield provocatively blurs the line between being ‘about’ 9/11 and being (mere) entertainment, Knowing lands squarely in the latter camp.”
Atom Egoyan’s Adoration: A Return to Form(s)?
“In classic Egoyan style, the humor is always also terrifying. . .”
Jesus Fucking Christ: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist
The scandal-plagued release of Lars von Trier’s latest film inspired Jack Stevenson, American expat in Copenhagen, to take a deeper look at the film in a Danish context.
Sleep Stalking: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Four Nights with Anna
“Just like you wanted, grandma. I’m seeing a woman.”
Crime · Drama · Noir · Reviews
Women Larger Than Life: Program Notes 2: King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest (1949) / Gerd Oswald’s Crime of Passion (1957)
Note: The humble program note has a long and noble history. Sometimes anonymous, sometimes not, cheered as often as they were reviled, these brief, ephemeral, often illuminating handouts, likely destined for the dustbin the same night they appeared, offer “wisdom in a nutshell,” as one of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s characters aptly put it. This article is the second in Bright Lights’ series of vintage program notes from those heady days of the 1970s when unstoppable auteurists started their own cine clubs and commandeered movie theaters to bring their idea of cine-culture to audiences. Our late friend Roger McNiven continues the series with fascinating write-ups of two more works on the subject of “women larger than life,” in this case Bette Davis in King Vidor’s woefully underrated Beyond the Forest and Barbara Stanwyck in Gerd Oswald’s undeservedly obscure Crime of Passion. This double feature was screened at the legendary Thalia Theatre in New York City on Monday, December 3, 1979. We have added images but not edited the text, deferring to the time and spirit in which it was written.
Drama · Essays · Uncategorized
An Atheist’s Guide to Wise Blood: The Doctrine of the Auto-Redemptionist
“It’s almost as if The Misfit himself were behind the camera.”
The Volleyball in the Void: Tom Hanks Is Cast Away
Pascal . . . Kierkegaard . . . Nietzsche . . . Zemeckis?
Vicky and Woody and François: On Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona
The return of Jules and Jim?
Think Globally, Role-play Locally: On Olivier Assayas’ Thriller Boarding Gate
“Its failures are what make it sowatchable.”
Where Do We Find Ourselves? John Cassavetes’ Faces Turns 40
“How can one be a maverickindependent filmmaker, and be an attentive,lovinghusband and father?”
Who Do You Love? Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game Reconsidered
Was Le Grande Jean too soft on the aristos?
Stunted Lives: On 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days
Unsettling and unmissable
When Virtue Sleeps: The Moral World of Denys Arcand’s L’Âge des Ténèbres
“We are asked to think morally: is the happiness these characters seek possible or desirable?”
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