Documentaries · Exploitation & Erotica
Livin’ large with the Hung One Porn has had its share of superstars, but none were bigger – in every sense – than John Holmes. This “little boy with a[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
The illustrious history of the king of the hepcats (and the queen of deadpan) Louis Prima and his wife Keely Smith were a staple of ’50s and ’60s variety TV,[…]
“I guess it all works if you revere Stephen Sondheim.” Have you been kicking yourself ever since May 3, 1970, when you weren’t there for the marathon recording session that[…]
“Some of the mise-en-scene has a suffocating beauty, as in the bravura marriage sequence where the screen is clogged to the breaking point with images – a strategy that shows[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“Shall we take it straight through?” Swing Time is the last Fred & Ginger musical to have it all – lots of great songs from Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields,[…]
Asian · Historical & Epic · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Truly subversive or mere cinematic “seasoning,” in the director’s own phrase? I am the first to admit that Oshima Nagisa’s Gohatto (1999, more literally “Against the Law,” but titillatingly translated[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Abigail Child’s compulsive visual collages are visual and aural legerdemain Since the 1970s, experimental filmmaker and poet Abigail Child has been engaged in a kind of cultural archaeology. Unearthing found[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Reviews
Archival footage, dramatizations, and dark satire capture the dire end-of-century events in the former Yugoslavia Film after film bombards the eye with images of destruction: buildings split open, their wire[…]
Louis Hayward in tights! Edgar Ulmer’s reputation rests largely on a series of no-budget, claustrophobic noirs and thrillers like Strange Illusion, Bluebeard, and of course Detour. But this director was[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
The best jazz documentary just got better Turn a fashion photographer loose on the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, and what do you get? Lots of artsy-fartsy shots of sea,[…]
A beachhouse, no parents, and the fleeting pleasures of “krampach” Coming-of-age dramas are dicey material at best, ever in danger of succumbing to John Hughes-style clichés about bourgeois brats, or[…]
Asian · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
These boys mix it up, sort of, in India’s first gay indie Writer-director Kaizad Gustad’s Bombay Boys (1998) is, of course, not the first Indian film to deal “seriously” with[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
“No actual fucking!” as the author says, but there are plenty of other pleasures in this lurid ’60s rarity whose authorship remains contested. American International Picture’s De Sade (starring Keir[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Horror · Pre-Code · Reviews
The normals are the real freaks in this still gut-wrenching horror classic Production Notes In mid-1931, MGM production head Irving Thalberg summoned scenarist Willis Goldbeck to tell him the time[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
There may be trouble ahead.” Follow the Fleet is perhaps the most problematic film in the Astaire/Rogers series. It has an excruciatingly bad plot; it has a singularly lame performance[…]
Crime · Reviews · Thrillers & Action
Scorsese’s wiseguy gangsters as modern-day knights errant In medieval times there were no countries and few strong kings. Monks hid in fortress monasteries while marauding knights brutalized the peasants. Most[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Horror
It wasn’t long ago that the idea of seeing a Lucio Fulci film outside its natural habitat of the urban grindhouse or the obscure home video would have been too[…]
This article appeared originally in the all-Hong Kong issue of Bright Lights #13 (1994). Based on research by Sek Kei. Edited, with additional material, by Rolanda Chu and Grant Foerster[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
What’s black and white and simply reeks with class? Top Hat is the apotheosis of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It has five dances, a total they matched in only[…]
Asian · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Two HK classics blur – make that erase – gender boundaries with thrilling results Films from Hong Kong have emerged to mainstream non–Chinese-speaking film audiences in the United States. Last[…]
