Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Out of the closets and onto the screen Queer film festivals have always been a crucial flashpoint for community. Starting in the 1970s, with the now sprawling San Francisco version,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Genres
All movies have the potential to become a non-movie, particularly when the movie showcases a cause, a disease, a celebrity, an actor’s virtuosity, a play or musical. The movie becomes[…]
Documentaries · Visual Artists
“All there is to do now is scream.” One view of “outsider art” is that it’s often the product of a hyper-productive, typically male naif who’s closer to his own[…]
“A Hollywood Satan is a persistent devil” There is a simple, plain logic to sequels. Capitalize on the prodigious success of the original movie. Sometimes the box office success of[…]
” … I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,” he said. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s an obscenity, a theory, a perversity.” “Well[…]
“A whole load of ‘Aw’ with not a lot of ‘shucks,’ updated only by a little cunnilingus.” If David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence were an actor, it would be[…]
“Who doesn’t want to be rescued by their narrator?” Sometimes a film’s camera takes you on one track, while its music sends you on another, wider one: it offers you[…]
Unmasking (the) America(n) Two of the largest influences on postwar American life were the virtual invention of the teenager and self-help. Something for nothing underlies the idea behind each development.[…]
“Her English accent wanders around her mouth like a playful ice cube.” Have pity on The Return of the Soldier. Shot in England in 1982, the film did not get[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Silents
“I was never young, and if you were never young, how can you ever feel old?” Towards the end of Follow Me, Boys! (1966), a particularly obnoxious piece of Walt[…]
SF & Fantasy · Visual Artists · Writers & Critics
“The more you’re able to project your own world upon the work, the more power it has.” Peter Chung is not your average sci-fi figure. First, he cuts a studied[…]
“The great legal scholar Lenny Bruce once observed that in the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls . . .” The long, astonishing final sequence of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · Silents
The last of the great silent clowns now on DVD “Step Right Up and Call Me Speedy!” Harold Lloyd has often — too often, really — been called the Anthony[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
“Dafydd Thomas (Lucas), a delusional queen in PVC fetish drag, jealously guards his status as ‘the only gay in the village’ even when competing queens arrive to challenge him.” 119[…]
Queens in jeans? Bareback Mountain? Buttfuck Mountain? Steers n’ Queers? Homos on the Range? Has there ever been a movie that invited more witticisms?1 In fact, Brokeback should be called[…]
This ghost story’s charms are far from ephemeral At a point in cinema’s long history when multiplex horror films either have the staying power of 20-year-old aspirin (The Ring) or[…]
Tsai pushes the art/porn envelope — or does he? With The Wayward Cloud (Tian Bian Yi Duo Yun — literally “A Cloud at the Edge of the Sky,” 2004), Tsai[…]
“Nothing is so transient as sanity and safety . . .” Free from his past and sufficiently angry to wage war, Germain enlists Vorzet’s talents as psychiatrist — he believes[…]
Asian · Directors · Interviews
And other tasty subjects Fruit Chan’s Dumplings provoked unprecedented attention at the 2005 Melbourne International Film Festival, first and foremost because of its controversial and idiosyncratic narrative, but also because[…]
Actors & Personalities · Westerns
“Easy to overlook but endlessly rewarding to look over” Joel McCrea, an amiable, modest actor who turned down parts because he felt he wasn’t good enough for them, began his[…]
