Hollywood · Music & Musicals · Pre-Code
An essay excerpted from the new edition of Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism, edited by Joseph McBride, 2026. Originally published in 1968 by the Wisconsin Film Society[…]
We watch, and it feels like anything could happen at a session that doubled as once-in-a-zeitgeist party, with Beatles, a host of rock luminaries – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Donovan,[…]
It’s in Hobson’s Choice that De Banzie and Mills effect one of the warmest and most real accounts of love and marriage ever put on film. Of many effortlessly achieved[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · Music & Musicals
In Tár, Field fashions an improbable representation of power (Hernández, “Top Orchestras”) to advance the idea that power is faceless. But the idea is only to be believed if the[…]
Why would writer-director Todd Field make the character so eloquent, cast her with such a beloved actress, and spend so much screen time building pathos for her, all the while[…]
Colonialism · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals · Myth and Archetype · Native Americans · Westerns
The handful of “frontier operas” we’ll consider therefore propose an unusual dialectic of both aesthetics and ideology. What might occur when male Western heroes – traditionally stoic and pragmatic –[…]
Brigadoon is a quasi-origin story that is closely associated with the way stories transform the reality of the recent past. Communities, societies, and nations survive by means of having sacrificial[…]
Dance · French Cinema · Interviews · Music & Musicals
Dancing in the streets of Rochefort was the best performing experience I’ve ever known. Reacting to real sunshine, breezes, cafés, and streets was miraculous. My emotions suddenly became as accessible[…]
Celebrity Culture · Counterculture · Music & Musicals · Production History · Societal Trends · Youth
A rewatch benumbed to this flash and flare reveals the stark morbidity of Head. Throughout the movie the Monkees are assaulted, hunted, and caged. Words fail, fists fail. The film[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals
Their performance isn’t marked by precision or technical mastery. It’s an onrush of unbridled enthusiasm all the way through – a frenzied, joyous romp that treats the show as if[…]
Actors & Personalities · Dance · Dancers · Hollywood · Music & Musicals
He is transfixing just walking across the screen in his first movie, Dancing Lady (1933), where he partners Joan Crawford and looks as if he could fly if he wanted[…]
The Sharks and Jets may have been initially inspired by Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues, but the gang members we see are really first cousins of the “troubled youth” in popular[…]
Comedy · DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals · Production History
ALLAN ARKUSH: Get Crazy never actually got a real release, you know. It was in theaters for a month. . . . A month? I’m sorry, a week, in some[…]
Comedy · Documentaries · Music & Musicals
This Is Spinal Tap is coated with the stylized veneer of a rockumentary turned inside out or, rather, back on itself as self-conscious dress-up, playful disguise. The cultivated image of[…]
Music & Musicals · TV & Streaming
“The height of the Bush era was a weird, giddy time.” – Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Milli Vanilli’s Girl You Know It’s True (1989) * * * Cop Rock (ABC,[…]
Counterculture · Music & Musicals · Noir
In noir, tales of wrongful accusation tend to play out on mean streets that reflect social inequalities, which at times do have a nasty way of tilting normally upright people[…]
“When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s going to tell the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.” – Bob Dylan (while not wearing a mask), Rolling Thunder[…]
But goes on being itself * * * True Love in cinema is more than fine acting, well-written scripts, or even directorial tone. Not that IMDb cast and crew should[…]
Drama · Music & Musicals · War
Suddenly jazz became a major taboo in Soviet society until Stalin’s death. In Western Europe, by contrast, mainly in Paris, jazz took off after the Nazis’ defeat in the hues[…]
LGBT & Queer · Music & Musicals
Les Chansons d’amour is unusual because of the realism of its characters, setting and story; the film has little dance and no big production numbers, but it is a musical.[…]
