Sleep Stalking: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Four Nights with Anna
“Just like you wanted, grandma. I’m seeing a woman.”
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“Just like you wanted, grandma. I’m seeing a woman.”
Crime · Drama · Noir · Reviews
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
“It’s almost as if The Misfit himself were behind the camera.”
Pascal . . . Kierkegaard . . . Nietzsche . . . Zemeckis?
The return of Jules and Jim?
“Its failures are what make it sowatchable.”
“How can one be a maverickindependent filmmaker, and be an attentive,lovinghusband and father?”
Was Le Grande Jean too soft on the aristos?
“We are asked to think morally: is the happiness these characters seek possible or desirable?”
Unsettling and unmissable
Jon Halliday’s indispensable Sirk on Sirk has confirmed what Sirk’s admirers and students had long suspected: that his films are not all equally “personal,” and that he had a much[…]
In Douglas Sirk’s world, romantic love doesn’t play much of a part. His characters are boxed into ruts which are ever-deepening; they cannot understand themselves or their desperate predicaments, let[…]
“Once upon a time in sunny California” reads a title card immediately after the credits for Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow. “Once upon a time” triggers an expectation of a fairy[…]
Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
The master of improv gets his due courtesy of Criterion’s extras-laden box set
Drama · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Criterion’s double-feature DVD features two minor works by two major auteurs
Alexander Payne’s new indie is headed in the wrong direction
Two sides of the same desperate coin
Activist & Political · African American · Biopic · Drama
He’s back
