Sunshine and Coconut Milk: The Criterion Collection Serves Up Midnight Cowboy
Nearly fifty years after its release, it’s clear Midnight Cowboy pulled off a neat trick. Its story of a naïve “Texas longhorn bull” hustler and a low-rent con man is[…]
Category: Genres
Essays · French Cinema · Romance
Any Time, Any Place: Plot as Pretext from Renoir to Rohmer
What will become of Camilla? A character who is unsupported by theatrical context must cease to exist; when the curtain falls, the characters are unleashed from aesthetic dimensions. Renoir makes[…]
Essays · Historical & Epic · War
Manning Up on the North Shore: American Masculinity and the Early Surf Movies
. . . or how the first surf films helped American men get over the war and change their act * * * In the 1950s and early ’60s, a[…]
Michael Clayton: Hollywood’s Last Movie for Adults
Michael Clayton is a character who gets a wake-up call. It’s not an “oh, wow, they killed off that character” moment, it’s not a clever reveal, it’s not an “instant[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · War
Casablanca and The Third Man in a World Made by War
The Third Man ends with rejection, physical and emotional death, a descent into a sewer, a walk through a graveyard and cold silence. The ruins of Vienna come to symbolize[…]
Daddy Issues: Anxiety and the Muted Triumphs of Goro Miyazaki’s Tales from Earthsea
“Hayao Miyazaki gets zero marks as a father but full marks as a director of animated films.” – Goro Miyazaki1 * * * Most artists exist under what the literary[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Watch It Again! The Avengers (2012) and the Intertextuality Problem
A Transformers film has to face incessant criticism about the amount of action, the blurry continuity of its symphonies of shrapnel, the overuse of MacGuffins, and the lack of good[…]
Meta-Anti-Musical: Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark
Dancer in the Dark is largely about movies, in particular, about those movies in which people sing and dance their troubles away. Even this self-reflexivity situates the film in the[…]
Asian · Interviews · Producers & Studios · Production History
Moving from Japanese Film Distribution to Production: An Interview with Third Window Films’ Adam Torel
What Third Window’s practices and Adam Torel’s insights provide is a view of the industry that contrasts significantly from current Japanese film research, especially in light of other exhibitors and[…]
When Heaven Came to Earth: Letter to My Millennial Friend on Alan Rudolph’s Made in Heaven, Shot the Year You Were Born
MY CHUM, JANE LILEE, Being as it’s coming up on the anniversary of our meeting, I thought I’d check in with you, and maybe get points for remembering the occasion.[…]
Happy Birthday, Baby! Irving Berlin (b. May 11, 1888) on Film
This article first appeared in Bright Lights in October 2000. We reprint it as a tribute to the seminal composer on what would have been his 130th birthday. (And frankly, we’re surprised[…]
Fashion · LGBT & Queer · TV & Streaming
What Exactly Do We Spy with Our Queer Eye? Neoliberalism and Homonormativity in the Revival of a Noughties Classic
Queer Eye strips queerness of radical intention and repackages it as the non-threatening support system of heteronormative practice, with the Fab Five offered up as the ultimate Gay Best Friend[…]
Watch It Again: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
The high-tech and the primitive coexist in The Life Aquatic, much as they do in Keaton’s The Navigator, and as in all of Anderson’s films they combine with the deeply[…]
Comedy · Drama · Festivals & Awards
Dispatch from Tribeca #5: Short Takes on To Dust, Song of Back and Neck, Diane
To Dust (dir. Shawn Snyder) “Isn’t that sweet,” I thought when I picked up my mother’s dropped pocket calendar. So many dates had names on them. Mom doesn’t want to[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
Dispatch from Tribeca #4: Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie
“I’m grateful I didn’t grow up with Barbie.” – Gloria Steinem * * * Gloria Steinem isn’t alone. Lisa Simpson hates Barbie. Feminist writer Roxanne Gay wishes Barbie had never[…]
Dispatch from Tribeca #2: Ghostbox Cowboy: Capitalists in the Coffee Shop
I don’t like these three guys in this coffee shop either. I can’t help but compare them to the Ghostbox opportunists who were written to be disliked. That much –[…]
Comedy · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
Dispatch from Tribeca #1: If you loved Gilda, you’ll Love, Gilda
The effect is intimate, but not particularly enlightening. Love, Gilda offers a lot of reminiscing, some sweet (and a few heavy) insights, but very little new information about Radner’s life.[…]
Focus on Robert Altman: Three Takes on Popeye
Unassimilated weirdness is typical of Popeye – even in its soundtrack, where goofy “boing” effects are used to accompany ordinary, unheroic movement. Sweethaven’s anthem, the Harry Nilsson song “Everything Is[…]
Meat for the Machine: On the Hidden Horrors of Alain Resnais’ Documentary Shorts
Covering topics as banal as the production of plastics and as profound as cultural appropriation, these films aren’t workaday projects so much as serious visual essays that extend Resnais’ preoccupation[…]
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