“Nothing Inside”: On Pablo Larraín’s El Conde (2023)
This man who watches you returns from hell […]; he is hollow, he is full of air. Dry hands hold him upright from behind, like a house of cards being[…]
Category: Genres
Comedy · LGBT & Queer · Sex & Relationships · Uncategorized
Meta-Morphoses: Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun (2023)
As seen with Jordan and Mateo, Silva extends his self-fictionalization to most of the cast, taking actors and regurgitating them as screen versions of themselves. Sometimes the cinematic portraits come[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Drama · Labor
Strategizing Solidarity: Ken Loach’s The Old Oak (2023)
“There can be no resistance without memory or universalism” – Jean-Luc Godard, In Praise of Love (2001) * * * With his new feature, The Old Oak (2023), Ken Loach[…]
The (Asian) American Dream: Neoliberal Feminism, Orientalism, and Ambivalence in Crazy Rich Asians
Crazy Rich Asians’ re-orientalization of Asians reinforces Eurocentrism and the Western gaze. Feminist and Orientalist readings of this film ultimately divulge the ability of Asians in the West to subconsciously[…]
Documentaries · India · Labor · Uncategorized
Offshore Matters: Emotional Labour in India’s Call Center Documentaries
While complaints about the industry’s orchestration of emotions and personality were commonplace, some workers also celebrated the prerogative of assembling new identities (58). Moreover, their exposure to Western cultural habits[…]
Books · Drama · German Cinema · LGBT & Queer · Melodrama
Book Review: Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman
Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman (Semiotext(e), May 2023, pp. 200, $11.99. * * * In William Motley’s best-selling 1947 novel Knock on Any Door, the author cites an adage that[…]
African · African American · Books · Hollywood · Horror
Book Review: I Walked with a Zombie, by Clive Dawson
Clive Dawson, I Walked with a Zombie. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2023. 120 pages. Available in hardback and e-book. * * * At a time when education and culture are increasingly[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Comics · Eastern European · Hollywood
Reluctantly “Cuddles”: On S. Z. Sakall
S. Z. Sakall’s ultra-rare 1954 memoir, The Story of Cuddles, attests that there was more to the comic actor than adorable fretfulness and jiggly jowls * * * He was[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Changeling: The Comic Art of Woody Allen
“‘You can’t control life,’ he tells us in that film. ‘”It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only art you can control. Art and masturbation.'”
Activist & Political · Directors · French Cinema · New Genres · New Media
Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Videographic Revolution: Here and Elsewhere (1976)
This impression of the look being “renewed” through the radical potential of video to sharpen one’s perception is vital to the core philosophy at the centre of Here and Elsewhere,[…]
African American · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“The Greatest Film About Race Ever Filmed in Hollywood”: Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo
Editor’s note: Bob Keser passed away on Oct. 5, 2015, from cardiac arrest, age 72. Although we never met, he was an important member of the Bright Lights team and a[…]
Horror · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Sexual Subversion: The Bride of Frankenstein
To celebrate Halloween, we repost your editor’s slightly revised analysis of James Whale’s immortal Bride of Frankenstein, which appeared previously on the site in 1997. * * * No institution[…]
The Search for André De Toth
André De Toth knew from the very beginning that he had to create a larger-than-life persona for him to be trusted with directing a picture. So he played the European[…]
Defending Cinematic Heresy: John Boorman’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic
Despite ritualistically crowning lists of the worst sequels ever made, in no way does The Heretic exemplify “sequelitis.” It’s neither a quick cash-in nor a rehash of the original. Its[…]
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · LGBT & Queer
Glen or Glenda: Psychiatry, Sexuality, and the Silver Screen
Normalizing “deviant” genders and bodies is just one of many tropes in Wood’s complex camp classic.
African · African American · Drama · Essays · Exile and Displacement · Family · Historical & Epic · Race · SF & Fantasy
Black Face Cinema: Historical Grief and the Angry Black (Wo)Man
A think piece discussing the movies Antebellum, Black Panther, Django Unchained, Get Out, and Us. It compares their reception and portrayal of anti-black racism and black suffering, via the lens[…]
Animation · Essays · Fairy Tale · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
To Infinity, and Beyond! Radical Self-Reorientation in the Toy Story Series
Looking back to the original Toy Story series, it seems obvious that one of the things that really helps Buzz accept his child’s toy nature is that he is good[…]
Why Are We So Obsessed with Tár?
Why would writer-director Todd Field make the character so eloquent, cast her with such a beloved actress, and spend so much screen time building pathos for her, all the while[…]
Absurdism · Activist & Political · Counterculture · Crime · Experimental & Underground · Fairy Tale · Politics · Writers & Critics
Alice’s Evolution: Chicago 70 and the Revolutionary Awakening of Lewis Carroll’s Victorian Heroine
Abstract Interposing characters, dialogue, and symbols from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland into a contemporary political scenario – the Chicago 7 trial – Kerry Feltham’s experimental film Chicago 70 provides[…]
Directors · Essays · Genres · Horror
Sexual Violence and Female Experience in Roman Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant
Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933, making him 89 years old on this day in 2023. We mark the occasion – we won’t say celebrate – by republishing Elise[…]
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