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.
Category: Genres
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[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Photo Essays
Frame Analysis: The Title Sequence for Doris Wishman’s Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965)
“This question of what makes a ‘bad girl’ is posed by the film’s title and answered by its title sequence – implied in the formal quotations (pinups) that inform each[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
Divide(d) and Conquer(ed): Notes on Income Inequality in Late-20th- and Early-21st-Century Cinema
“As the divide between rich and poor became more extreme, late 20th-century cinema required a new approach to achieve the same end: portraying the existence of the wealthy elite as[…]
A Brutal Nobility: Painting Death in The House with Laughing Windows (Pupi Avati, 1976)
“Inherent to defamiliarization or riddling is, of course, a process of refamiliarization: as the film proceeds, we wish to see the strange normalized, the riddle answered. But in The House with Laughing[…]
Happy Birthday, Ray Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013): An Interview with the Titan of Stop-Motion Animation
This interview with Ray Harryhausen first appeared in Bright Lights in November 2007. We reprint it here as a birthday tribute to the seminal animator. * * * “I wrecked Washington, and[…]
Tokuko Nagai Takagi (1891-1919): Japan’s First Actress
Aaron Cohen’s profile of the obscure Japanese silent star Tokuko Takagi (also known as Taku Takagi), who came to America in 1906 and made a few films for Thanhouser Studios, first[…]
Crime · TV & Streaming · Writers & Critics
Monster at the End: Pessimism’s Locked Rooms and Impossible Crimes (on True Detective)
“The end has already happened, and all Rustin Cohle and Marty Hart can do is arrange the bodies in a pattern that makes them look less like bodies, more like[…]
Punishing the Wolf of Wall Street: Jordan Belfort’s Second Act
“According to documents provided by the US Department of Justice, in the year he received almost $1 million for the rights to his memoir, Belfort made restitution payments totaling just[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · TV & Streaming · Westerns
Happy Birthday, Richard Boone! Got Trouble? Wire Paladin! The Western for Existentialists
Today is actor Richard Boone’s birthday (June 18, 1917 – January 10, 1981). We’re celebrating it by reprinting Alan Vanneman’s pithy write-up (previously published in issue 48, May 2005) of[…]
The Dream Behind the Reality: Amiable Lunacy and Blithe Brutality in Harvey
“What befalls Veta can perhaps be justified as part of the film’s critique of psychiatry; after all, her unfortunate experience mocks the short-sightedness and arbitrary operation of the mental health[…]
There Goes the Neighborhood: Godzilla and the Gentrification of Pulp
“Godzilla has no anarchy or eccentricity, much less any experimental spirit or Japanese weirdness. Edwards is too preoccupied with turning the movie into something new, serious, and, worst of all,[…]
Godzilla #1: Godzilla ex Machina: Taking All the Fight out of Humanity
“If Godzilla is not benevolent but merely indifferent, then his mercy amounts to that of a man sidestepping an anthill instead of trampling it under his heel.” Conventional academic and[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
The American Epidemic: AIDS in (Recent) Cinema and History
Discussed in this essay: The Battle of AmFar (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2013); Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013); How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012); The Normal[…]
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