Directors · Experimental & Underground
“For him, film was not only a profession but a mean of investigating cinema as a language, an investigation in which theory and film practice went hand in hand.”
Genres · Production History · War
“With flags fluttering, the cast stoically stands at attention, with tears streaming down their stiff upper lips. Even with their country’s destruction, the boys reflect a military mentality, still in service to their country.”
“Britt looks like the top as he bends Kato over and as he barks orders at his employee, but as every physical confrontation in the film demonstrates, Kato is the stronger man in both mind and body.”
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
“Facing fear and not concoctions of fear serving the needs of our own resident guardians of wealth and power is a far different enterprise than joining the enthusiasts of self-empowerments’ call “to just wish it.”
“There is no excuse for what others have called the “bro-magnon” film The Hangover, which unapologetically and even aggressively defends the model of masculinity that poo-poos date rape as some feminazi invention to further harass those poor, horny, entitled men.”
“Kim decided to retreat into an interior world where he does not need to confront or take but where his time can be sucked up by shitting in fields, smoking fish, getting drunk, and singing.”
“How do you get a “Headstart” program going that isn’t about implanting early entrepreneurial ambitions in toddlers but one that gets a head start on that sort of brain ownership? More difficult: How do you develop a resistance to such ownership by the surround we are born into without falling into the illusions of an individual will-to-power?”
“While Altman’s description of the detective and his generic milieu as it evolved by the early 1970s works up to a point, the idea that his film closes a genre fails under examination. Such a position misjudges the primary pleasure derived from the American detective film, and misinterprets the satisfaction The Long Goodbye’s ending provides when set within this pleasure and these films.”
“The sheer physical immensity of this space threatens to hijack everything else in the film, and it’s a testament to Reichardt’s directorial intelligence that she lets it, and that she makes it work as part of a larger project.”
“I didn’t mean to call you a meatloaf, Jack!” — David (David Naughton), An American Werewolf in London
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
“It’s encouraging to see how articulate and unafraid many of the kids in Put This on the Map are in deciding who they want to be, how they want to live, and even what they want to be called: ‘Very gay,’ ‘an ally,’ ‘dating an FTM,’ ‘not straight, gay, bi, anything.'”
Genres · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
“The arrival of Kirk on the scene precipitates a kind of crisis in the equilibrium of this pair of older, controlling-male and young subordinate-woman. What happens is that the woman is somehow awakened by the arrival of the Enterprise crew — awakened sexually, but also in a much broader sense.”
Like a straight, poorly drawn, less fluid Ambiguously Gay Duo
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica
“These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”
Asian · Comedy · Festivals & Awards
“This wonderfully flexible approach to movie-making explains why Wai and To’s films seem so alive to every implication — unlike most current U.S. comedies, where directors carefully steer around obstacles and pretend not to notice flaws in the set-up.”
Asian · Essays · Uncategorized
“During the so-called ‘repressive’ ages sex was a joy, because it was practiced in secret and it made a mockery of all of the obligations and duties that the repressive power imposed. Instead, in tolerant societies, as the one we live in is declared to be, sex produces neuroses because the freedom granted is false and above all, it is granted from above and not won from below.” —Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006) “Have you noticed how fashionable couples are today? But it is a completely false and insincere couple, frighteningly insincere. See these kids under the power of who knows what romantic notion, they walk hand-in-hand, or arm-in-arm, a young man and a girl. ‘What is this sudden romanticism?’, you may ask. Nothing. It is simply the new couple as revived by consumerism because this consumerist couple buys.” —Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006)
Crime · Essays · Historical & Epic
“Putting aside whatever doubts the FBI had about its image in these films, the two films represent one of the many fascinating permutations of the gangster film in the studio era, with the heroic FBI agent acting in a manner befitting an upstanding American, yet able to shift gears and punch out a gangster.”
“There’s something curiously remote and cool at the center of it, something slightly out of focus that makes this melodrama rather ambiguous and hard to assemble.”
“Putting the pain back into violence is Friedkin’s real achievement in The Hunted, and indeed his unfashionable, irony-free approach helps explain why the film never found its audience in a decade where torture porn induced new depths of numbness in viewers.”
“How can it be that the act that socially and historically has defined masculinity and to which, to a significant extent, male self-esteem is ultimately linked is not reliably rewarding to women?” —Rachel P. Maines
