Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Silents · Women in Film
If she is seen simply as a free spirit, a woman who lives for sexual pleasure, and as exemplary on that account, a model liberated woman (as Louise Brooks herself[…]
Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · German Cinema
Its release on Blu-ray is in some ways a belated victory for the film, whose unsuccessful release in the United States eighty-five years ago was a disappointment to Trenker and[…]
African American · Drama · Melodrama · Reviews · Women in Film
This article appeared first in our all-Sirk print issue (#6, Winter 1977) and was reposted in the March 1997 online version of Bright Lights. We present it here to celebrate[…]
Directors · Drama · Production History
For all his flaws, Welles was not a man with a fear of completion, but rather one who would hold on to finishing his work to the absolute breaking point.[…]
Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Women in Film
The relative obscurity of van Brakel’s works gives these decades-old films a sort of newness. Indeed, there’s a genuineness in the films that seems foreign, even exotic, in our streaming[…]
Human beings have an infinite capacity to adapt to the most adverse circumstances; what other animal can thrive in both the hottest deserts and the coldest mountains? Watching Room, I[…]
Actors & Personalities · Colonialism · Drama · Essays · Historical & Epic · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
Near the close of our Skype meeting, my conversation with James Fox turned inside out. He enquired if he could ask me a question. He then tried to assemble the[…]
Trauma can plant its seed-bomb in the minefield of a vulnerable mind, a risk every participant in war takes, and one the film addresses in several contexts. For the viewer,[…]
Activist & Political · Biopic · Documentaries · Drama · Eastern European · Middle East
Like Assayas’s Carlos, Ujică’s Autobiography mostly remains an investigation of a public figure in its public functions. And both films subtly decenter their Big Man of History protagonists. Both document[…]
African American · Drama · LGBT & Queer · Sex & Relationships
The visual style shows people as essentially solitary, a remarkable choice of perspective in view of the importance of the wider social realities – racial and sexual – that “create”[…]
Within this tightly composed spiral of compounding blackmail, which implicates a high-ranking South American diplomat and resembles the byzantine schemes in Merry-Go-Round, de Gregorio catalogues a litany of sins: lust,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama
You would never guess either from looking at him or from the “aw shucks” way in which he’s remembered that Stewart is responsible for some of the most erotic romantic[…]
Biopic · Drama · Writers & Critics
In both texts, these strategies suggest similar attempts to represent the present moment’s relationship to the American past. Faulkner’s devastating analysis of race and Welles’s meditations on wealth and worth[…]
Drama · Military and Paramilitary · Philosophy · Thrillers & Action · Urban Conflict · War
This essay discusses Eye in the Sky’s elaborate staging of the trolley problem, a famous philsophical thought experiment designed to tease out our criteria for moral judgments. The author argues[…]
Drama · Essays · Religion & Spirituality
Dare to step together into an “usness” that has no guarantees but the shared vision of belonging, whose embers you agree to slowly tend. History provides the furnishings that are[…]
Drama · Essays · Literature and Film · Westerns
We must dissect why Hud succeeded with reviewers and audiences alike, but to differing effects. The task at hand is not merely to provide a clear analysis of the issues[…]
Drama · Reviews · Thrillers & Action
Ocean’s Twelve finds itself the black sheep of the trio, inspiring bewilderment and even scorn for its lax attitude toward typical genre beats and for its gutsy meta gambit, which[…]
Biopic · Drama · Gothic · Mystery · Myth and Archetype · Psychology
“The opus begins in dying.” – James Hillman “Just as each Gothic tale is itself a dream and also a mirror showing the reader his mind, everything within these symbolic[…]
Costume Drama · Drama · Horror · Literature and Film · Women in Film
In transposing Rebecca, notice how Hitchcock’s camera attends to shadows – bisecting faces and bruising frames – to approximate du Maurier’s disorienting syntax and looming dread. Or watch as his[…]
Activist & Political · Animals · Drama
Although Babe was released a quarter-century ago, its critique of animal agriculture remains timely. Babe celebrates the “unprejudiced heart” of its eponymous piggy hero, who narrowly escapes becoming Christmas dinner[…]
