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[…]
How Jessica Biel’s Moral Hotness Tamed the West While Tobe Hooper’s original 1973 Texas Chainsaw Massacre stands tall in the orchards of horror academia as a symbol of the dismemberment[…]
We have met the enemy and he is us The Guardian (1990) concerns itself with the guardian spirits of trees. We’re told some guardian spirits are evil. In this very[…]
Life is earnest, sure, but why does art have to be? “No one got further in history with less intellectual baggage than Cicero,”1 as Freddie Binkard Artz2 liked to say.[…]
Romero’s canonical work remains timely decades later Introduction There has been a veritable outbreak of zombie films in the last few years, from Hollywood blockbusters Resident Evil (Anderson, 2002) and[…]
“You’d be hard to replace”? Damn near impossible! How hard is it to lose those last ten pounds, eh? Well, pretty damn hard, but if Ginger Rogers had been able[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
We loved him, we loved him not Of all the Presidents the United States has had to endure over the last couple of centuries, this country’s relationship with Richard Nixon[…]
