Directors · Drama · Outsiders · War · Writers & Critics
Rumanian refugee Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) conning a guileless California schoolteacher, Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland, in an Oscar-nominated role), into marrying him so he can enter the United States[…]
Crime · Drama · Production History
“Dedicated to Charlie Bluhdorn who inspired it.” * * * Not only is Mario Puzo’s The Godfather the stuff of Hollywood legend, but so is its turbulent production. Even after[…]
Counterculture · Directors · Drama · Interviews · Restorations
Dennis wasn’t originally hired to direct Out of the Blue, rather he was hired to act in it. After about a week of shooting, the production manager, Paul Lewis, who[…]
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[…]
Directors · Historical & Epic · Horror · Politics
I have been a fan of writer/director Larry Cohen ever since viewing his 1970s classics The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977) and It Lives Again (1978). Cohen was[…]
Horror · Psychology · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming · Women in Film
But that’s not to deny the series’ eerie impact, all the same – starting with the level, assured-past-urgency mortician’s cool of Newland himself and his unnerving, implacable smile. Is it[…]
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[…]
Indies · New Genres · New Media
The easier it is to relate to for the white girls aged TikTok to thirty-five who dominate this market, the better, and what these girls are longing for most is[…]
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[…]
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[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
In The Rise of Skywalker, Rey learns that her grandfather is Emperor Palpatine. Feeling more like a backtrack than a step forward, this new information is a betrayal of Rey’s[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian · Directors · Theory
When Lee’s daughter asks her new caretaker why the apartment is such a mess, she answers, “A house is like a person. It gets sick, grows old. The cracks in[…]
Directors · Essays · Romance · Writers & Critics
But these reflections bring Vertigo down to “depressing” reality. The view that reality is a downer redeemable only by “exalted seeing” is the basis for James Harvey’s disparagement of 1950s[…]
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[…]
What I want to lose here is any suggestion that there’s only one solution to the problem of getting through tough times together. * * * Three Billboards outside Ebbing[…]
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[…]
