“A Third Party Might Spoil This”: The Gay Divorcee
Fred and Ginger get continental on your ass The Gay Divorcee1 is the quintessential Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. It’s not their best – largely because Ginger’s dancing skills[…]
Category: Genres
Turning to Stone: Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street (2000)
Going down in San Francisco’s street-kid heroin underground Behind the image of San Francisco as a creative epicenter and ultimate party town drawing talented, disaffected kids from around the country[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · Reviews
The Politics of Deepa Mehta’s Water
An acclaimed auteur’s new film gets caught in the cultural crossfire. Author’s Statement In February this year I traveled to India to work as a camera assistant on the film[…]
The Lesbian Vanishes: These Three, Lillian Hellman’s Adaptation of The Children’s Hour (1936)
“All right, which one of you took the lesbian?” In 1935, the movie producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights to Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, intending to turn the[…]
Casino Royale at 33: The Postmodern Epic in Spite of Itself
It’s really a courtly epic in ’60s drag. It was a coup that Columbia Pictures had banked on: the one 007 property that got away from Broccoli and Saltzman’s cash[…]
Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid! Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho
Hitch’s – and by now the whole damn culture’s – seminal Oedipal nightmare revisited Read the companion photo essay “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone”[…]
Dogma/Dogme, or Live Cinema
From the land of Kierkegaard and crullers, the newest New Wavers resuscitate – and reform – an artform ready for last rites. “The time to make up your mind about[…]
Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964) on DVD
The cruelty and clarity of life in a sand pit in Japan, circa 1964 Revisiting past pleasures – long-past pleasures in this case – has its particular perils. In the[…]
The Killing of Sister George (Robert Aldrich, 1968) on DVD
Dykes in distress in Robert Aldrich’s late ‘60s masterpiece Robert Aldrich ranks with Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray as one of the “golden boys” of postwar commercial cinema whose formal[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
The Alley Cats (1966) on DVD
Can your heart stand it? More Radley Metzger! The title of Metzger’s “second film” (second by his own reckoning; other sources list it as his fourth, after Dark Odyssey, The[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
George Kuchar’s Secrets of the Shadow World
What do Sasquatch droppings and flying saucers have in common? George Kuchar, of course. Underground film impresario Jack Stevenson tells the story of how George Kuchar dealt with a problem[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
Three Films by Richard Dindo: Grüninger’s Fall; Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian Diary; Arthur Rimbaud: A Biography
The eminent Swiss documentarian looks at saints and sinners of history – without saying which are which “My films revolve around absence,” Swiss documentarian Richard Dindo has said, but the[…]
Three Films by Edgar G. Ulmer: Bluebeard, The Strange Woman, and Moon over Harlem
Making art in the most unlikely circumstances Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) was one of many beneficiaries of the wave of auteurism that galvanized critics in France in the 1950s and[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Graverobbers and Drag Queens from Outer Space! Four Ed Wood Greats on DVD
Plan 9 from Outer Space; Glen or Glenda; Jail Bait; Bride of the Monster One of my fondest memories of a communal movie experience is seeing my first Ed Wood[…]
Punk Girls on Film: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains
The kids are not all right! Riot girls have a long and noble history that extends far back beyond Hole and Courtney Love. No doubt the experts in this realm[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
Roger Corman on New World Pictures: An Interview from 1974
Fun in the New World Corman founded New World in 1970; it was his second attempt to control production and distribution (after the ill-fated Film Group, which lasted a couple[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
Laughing Pan: James Broughton
Ecstasy for all! says the pied piper of queer experimental film Every movement has its muses. James Broughton probably would have copped to being a muse, or perhaps more accurately,[…]
Crime · Noir · Reviews · Uncategorized
Carol Reed’s The Third Man on Criterion
Good golly, Mr. Holly! In one of the many extras in Criterion’s sumptuous DVD presentation of Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Peter Bogdanovich calls the film “the greatest non-auteur film[…]
Denounced, Cut, and Burned: The Passion of Joan of Arc
The film suffered almost as much as Joan before arriving in a gorgeous DVD. In spite of the hype, DVD is more often promise than fulfillment. Many, perhaps most, of[…]
Life Is … Pretty Good: Hermine Huntgeburth’s The Trio
Criminal high jinks with a different kind of family Family, aka “the F word,” comes in many forms, or so says Hermine Huntgeburth’s bittersweet black comedy The Trio (1998). This[…]
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