Sleep Stalking: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Four Nights with Anna
“Just like you wanted, grandma. I’m seeing a woman.”
Category: Drama
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?
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?”
Stunted Lives: On 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days
Unsettling and unmissable
God Is Dead, or Through a Glass Darkly: On Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession
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[…]
Love Affairs That Always Fade: Sirk’s Doomed Romances
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[…]
The Lure of the Gilded Cage: All I Desire and There’s Always Tomorrow
“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
Doing What Moves Them at the Moment: Five of Cassavetes’ Best on DVD
The master of improv gets his due courtesy of Criterion’s extras-laden box set
Drama · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Plumbing the Depths: Renoir and Kurosawa Do Gorky
Criterion’s double-feature DVD features two minor works by two major auteurs
Sideways: Sideways to Hell, Maybe!
Alexander Payne’s new indie is headed in the wrong direction
Mike Leigh’s 20th Century Snaps: Vera Drake and Naked
Two sides of the same desperate coin
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