Home Is Not Just for Christmas … or Thanksgiving … or Middle-Class Chaps, However Decent
To be clear, The Holly and the Ivy is not mistakable for a lost gem from Renoir or Mizoguchi. Yet it does make the most of a story told “in[…]
Category: Genres
Directors · Film Technology & History · Historical & Epic · Pre-Code · Religion & Spirituality · Silents
The Wickedest Movie in the World: How Cecil B. DeMille Made The Sign of the Cross
This post was adapted from the new book by Cecilia de Mille Presley and Mark A. Vieira, Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic (Running Press, 416pp, December[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Directors · Reviews
Radio Raheem Is a Broken Record: Lessons from Do the Right Thing on Its 25th Anniversary
“Do the Right Thing ends the morning after Radio Raheem’s death, but we have enough details to know how the rest of the narrative will play out. Radio Raheem was[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground · Silents · Sound & Language
Tomatoes Another Day: The Improbable Ideological Subversion of James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber
“Though standard critical appraisals would deem Tomatoes a deliberately crude affront to modern technical sophistication, it is itself the sophisticated artifact, its small rebellion resonating more strongly in a media[…]
Comedy · Crime · Sound & Language
Sound, Music, and the Verbal MacGuffin in American Hustle (2013)
American Hustle is, foremost, a film about appearances, about what is real and the constant dialogue between the diegetic and the extra-diegetic, which is especially compelling at the level of[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Pure Auteurness: Bert I. Gordon in the BIG World
What better way to celebrate Halloween than with Bert I. Gordon, budget-compromised auteur of War of the Colossal Beast, Earth vs. the Spider, Picture Mommy Dead, Empire of the Ants,[…]
Actors & Personalities · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Blu-ray Review: Recent Silent Film Releases from Flicker Alley
Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, W. C. Fields, Ben Turpin – the gang’s all here. Flicker Alley, a home video company founded in 2007, is not solely dedicated[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Festivals & Awards
Red Carpets and Radicals: The Shadow of Reality at the Fifth Odessa International Film Festival (July 11-19, 2014)
The Fifth Odessa International Film Festival was destined to be unlike its previous editions. Only two months previously, Odessa suffered an unprecedented peak in civil violence with the death of[…]
Book Review: Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios
Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, by Frederic Lombardi (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013, 370pp, $49.95 from the publisher’s website) Allan Dwan (1885-1981) was one of[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · Reviews
Introducing Kashmir: On Haider, Vishal Bharadwaj’s Riff on Hamlet
“Something is rotten in the state of Kashmir” – Improvising Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has taken rather long for a feature film set in Kashmir to get critical acclaim for its[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
We Are Not Who We Are: Human Sacrifice, Philosophical Horror, and (Maybe) the End of the World
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Fifty Shades of Ick: Gay Panic and Star Discourse/Star Panic and Gay Discourse
“The privileging of star persona over actor’s craft insists that sex within a narrative cannot, in fact, be a purely storytelling tool: it is required to be both a character[…]
Too Much Johnson: Recovering Orson Welles’s Dream of Early Cinema
Orson Welles’s Too Much Johnson is a youthful tribute to low comedy and reflects of his obsession with bygone times, cultural mores & means of expression.
Directors · Documentaries · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Big Worms and Big Fish: Jodorowsky, Dune, and Jodorowsky’s Dune
“Jodorowsky capitalizes on the cachet of exclusivity, the wonderful feeling of being one of the elite few who “get it,” and, in treating it like a source of esoteric wisdom,[…]
The Graveyard of Your Fucking Species: Wolfen: The End of the World by Wolves
“The most powerful aspect of Wolfen is not, then, its status as an exemplary and indeed essential period piece, but its unusual situation of contemporary New York City within the[…]
Flashback: See L.A. Confidential Again . . . the First Time
This review of L.A. Confidential first appeared in Bright Lights in May 1998. We’ve always been fond of this piece, and are happy to repost it now, not least because[…]
A (Re-)Emerging Cinema: New Forms of Documentary in Post-Soviet Russia
“Just as Peleshian’s friend put it to Daney some time ago, one could still say that there are indeed some people in the documentary sphere in Russian (and post-Soviet) documentary[…]
Crime · Directors · Thrillers & Action
Late Great Chabrol: Revisiting the French Master’s Final Decade from The Color of Lies (1999) to Inspector Bellamy (2009)
“Claude Chabrol,” David Thomson wrote in his 2010 obituary, “is the kind of figure who could be reclaimed after death.” Very well, then – four years later there is still[…]
The Monster Is Dead: On Godzilla and the End of Spectacle
“The monster movie has always been predicated on some anxiety about technology – whether it’s nuclear bombs or genetic engineering – and we may now wonder if this isn’t an[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Horror · Reviews
The Devils (the Angels): Sympathy for John Landis
“I can always make something work, if I have a camera.” – John Landis There are two John Landises. There’s the director equally at home with comedy as he is[…]
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