Commies, Commies, Everywhere – Tourneur’s The Fearmakers
Commie on a plane – Oliver Blake and Dana Andrews in The Fearmakers Under the credits of Jacques Tourneur’s The Fearmakers (1958) we see a bearded Dana Andrews being tortured[…]
Category: Genres
Historical & Epic · Movies · Reviews
300 Lies? Give Poetics a Chance
What’s Greek history without distortions, inaccuracies, and falsehoods? In the western Aegean, in a narrow pass by the Gulf of Malis, 300 Spartans and their Hellenic allies, led by King[…]
Genres · Horror · Movies · Reviews
Return of the Return of the Repressed: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later
Look familiar? When considering any contemporary zombie film, it is virtually impossible to resist comparison to the work of George A. Romero. Although many directors within the genre attempt to[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Close to Home: The Films of Su Friedrich on DVD
Autobiography sometimes trumps art in these uneven works Su Friedrich is a disciplined and highly skilled filmmaker who teaches school (film and video production at Princeton, to be precise) and[…]
Butterfly Dream: Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
“There’s no overt sexuality to Rawang’s care for Hsiao Kang. It’s a tender act of love, a selfless giving of himself to another.” With I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone[…]
Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking
Ecce homo I looked at him closely and more quickly (one can, without taking one’s eyes off an object, look very quickly. At that moment my “gaze” swooped down on[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Before The Green Door: The Mitchell Brothers, the Counterculture, and Hard-core’s Beginnings
It came from San Francisco This is the first of a two-part article exploring how hard-core porn evolved through the efforts of Jim and Artie Mitchell and other pioneers, with[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Space Here We Come: P. J. Harvey’s Please Leave Quietly Redefines the Concert Film DVD
“It flashes before our eyes, and we are not even sure what we have witnessed.” There is an incongruous moment in Please Leave Quietly (2006), the long-awaited concert DVD from[…]
The Valorized Artist: Incorporation into the “Perpetual Art Machine” [PAM]
Art for [PAM]’s sake The “Perpetual Art machine” [PAM] is a new media project begun in 2005 that presents the work of a large number of video artists as pieces[…]
Stay Well, or Else . . . Michael Moore’s Sicko
“What these Americans have could happen to us. And this is frightening.” Michael Moore’s Sicko begins with clips of what happens to Americans who don’t have health insurance. A man[…]
The Simpsons Movie: from D’oh to Dough! Helping white men get richer for 18 years!
Yes, Matt Groening and James L. Brooks are rich, rich white men, and thanks to The Simpsons Movie, they’re going to be even richer. Much as I would like to[…]
Herzog’s Tricky Rescue Dawn
Most critics have approached Werner Herzog’s latest film Rescue Dawn with qualifying kid gloves, as if it would be impolite to question a late work from such a grand old[…]
Classic Hong Kong Action Cinema, you are Avenged!
Fans of Hong Kong action cinema have long had to wade through murky, treacherous terrain, even with the arrival of DVD: bad transfers, faded, junky prints, badly cropped pan&scan;[…]
Kill Hagen! – Lang’s Kriemhild And Her Revenge
A 5-hour epic film in two parts about a bride who swears vengeance on the conspirators who killed her husband. That’s Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. It’s also an accurate description[…]
Documentaries · Genres · Movies · Reviews
Treed by the Family: On 51 Birch Street
For boomers, “the idea that Mom and Dad are flawed human beings with complicated histories and real feelings can be hard to accept.” The straight out of a first-grade primer[…]
Fashion and Dunst: The Substance of Marie Antoinette
“The Coppola ideal is a young girl trapped in fustiness: she can be an object of voyeurism without a trace of lewdness, and remain spiritually intact even when accessorized.” Sofia[…]
Queer Quickies: Random Short Reviews from April Shower to Wedding Wars
Note: With so much queer media happening lately — from feature films to reality TV shows to movies-of-the-week — I decided, like Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, to “go[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian
Beauties and Furies: Hong Kong’s New Wave of Women Stars
“The women of To’s world are not just endearingly kooky, but often unacceptably bizarre and amoral in their excited reactions to events.” Five years ago, I was starting to think[…]
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