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,[…]
Category: Drama
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[…]
Eighty Years of A Star Is Born: An Actress Evaluates a Classic
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[…]
All the Small Things: Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson
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[…]
“You’ve Gotta Do Something”: Cosmic Mobility and the Future of Mankind in Rebel Without a Cause
“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[…]
In Search of Lost Time: A Review of Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women
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[…]
