“It is a much starker contrast than, say, in Hitchcock’s London films of the same period, where the humorous grace notes of the urban everyday and a happy ending are balanced throughout by a recognition of the inherent instability and all-out terror of the same modernity that produces those grace notes.”
“The cheap production values of most WIP films required them to rely on the promise of forbidden spectacles such as sex (‘Love Starved Women!’), violence (‘Rape, riot, and revenge’), and often the pretense of an exposé (“The story of a woman’s prison today’) to attract moviegoers.”
“Director Arnold heightens the once-“natural” processes of life events such as birth and death by setting them outside, historically as if for the last time, before Western medicine and Victorian domesticity.”
Great drama often depends on the playwright’s ability to select (or invent) a fateful day or two in his hero’s life that symbolically sums him up and enables him to[…]
“The film’s main focus remains on the body as undesirable, non-ideal, open to external aggression and pollution. In typical Polanski fashion, the audience is trapped in an ‘uncomfortable visual space’ where the concept of a stable individual identity is never a matter of choice, but instead constituted by our surroundings and forces well beyond our grasp.”
Noir · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.” — Herbert Marcuse
Directors · Horror · Photo Essays
“The opening scenes of Freaks demonstrate a sophisticated use of staging, framing, editing, and camera movement to suture the audience into a complex set of sympathies. It is the work of a director in full control of the medium, able to use the camera to reveal a rich subtext beneath the dialogue.”
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
“We become faced with the individuality and humanity of history, the functioning components of a movement. 18 Days translates this reality of individual experience to film, in a sense presenting the audience with 10 YouTube clips of people affected by the revolution, telling their stories.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · TV & Streaming
Read about what you can’t see
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · Westerns
O to be torn, ‘twixt love and duty
Why do lesbians have to be so boring?
Directors · Interviews · LGBT & Queer
“I’m just always interested in the ways in which we are not free agents, that our desires, our instincts, our anger, our determination, our survival instincts all butt against social constraints and social learning that are really deep. It’s not just a matter of changing your job or your lover.”
“Life is a continuity which does not begin at birth; it is split up by birth.” — Nandor Fodor
“Kahaani captures this moment of rising disillusionment and change in the world. There is no ‘riding-into-the-sunset’ happy ending, for Vidya still remains an unhappy widow at the close of the movie: perhaps an appropriate resolution for these angsty times.”
Documentaries · Essays · Reviews
“To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.” – from “On the Concept of History” by Walter Benjamin
“If you can get past all these potentially off-putting deviations, Park Row offers Samuel Fuller at his most free, exuberant, and even experimental. As unfocused as the narrative is, it is essentially a realist fable, or collection of fables, condensing an entire rough-and-tumble era into a coincidence-riddled pill.”
“From now on we’ll do everything together. Just one big, happy family — father [helps up Mallare], daughter [puts his arm around Anna], and son-of-a-bitch [points to himself].” — from the film
Essays · Genres · LGBT & Queer · Memoir
“Just by going to the movies I became, like the Final Girl, a target. A target, in my case, for bullies loitering outside the theater after the movie’s over. Having been beaten up under the marquee in sixth grade, I’d become reluctant to attend horror movies. But I had to go, despite the risk. I had to see — to see as the Final Girl sees.”
Directors · Documentaries · New Media
“The whole effect is a Rand-esque, dream-like, dystopian feel. This is very much Curtis taking an auteur approach to his documentary — his creative personality is all over it and the effect is enthralling.” — from “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” review, The Telegraph, by Catherine Gee
“Who’d of thunk there was a fake Mae West?”
