Actors & Personalities · Drama · Essays · Romance
As with Monroe, his seemingly all-but-transparent method has proven remarkably difficult to emulate, much less duplicate. (Toles, 2003: 34) Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type? That was[…]
Counterculture · Dialogue · Drama · Romance
The subsequent dialogue between the two films developed after much negotiation and cajoling. They were inclined to be hostile to the other. I tried to inform them about their common[…]
Body Horror · Horror · Mumblecore · Romance
Not only does May challenge the tropes of mumblecore and indie-rom com movies, but it also retells elements of Frankenstein, offering a female protagonist who is both monster and monster-maker.[…]
The city of Visconti’s film is a palimpsest in which postwar modernity (nightclubs, movie theatres, beatniks, and loose women) is superimposed on the ruins of the city’s gothic past. Rather[…]
Plot lines about women wanting babies are as old as time, and can easily degenerate into sexist tropes. Daisy’s desire to have a kid doesn’t define her. Instead, over the[…]
Costume Drama · Designers · Drama · Fashion · Melodrama · Photo Essays · Romance
In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous. – Elsa Schiaparelli * * * Edgar G. Ulmer’s Her Sister’s Secret was released to theaters the same year as Mitchell Leisen’s To[…]
Comedy · Directors · Eastern European · Romance · Writers & Critics
Lubitsch biographers and critics have accepted the lore that the Hungarian plays he used for his films were inferior. That widely held perception has come about because Lubitsch’s admirers want[…]
In the corporate world the film depicts, the lower-level executives are small-time Lotharios who seek no more than sex from female underlings. Their boss, however, battens on the love he[…]
Directors · Essays · Romance · Writers & Critics
But these reflections bring Vertigo down to “depressing” reality. The view that reality is a downer redeemable only by “exalted seeing” is the basis for James Harvey’s disparagement of 1950s[…]
Drama · Melodrama · Pre-Code · Romance · War
James Whale’s Waterloo Bridge (1931) and Frank Borzage’s Little Man, What Now? (1934) depict human possibility in terms of what can transpire between two ordinary people, while holding out little[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama · Essays · Romance
QT’s films are commonly hurtling toward darkness, yet Once Upon feels like a repudiation, as much as a culmination, of his oeuvre. There’s a point in the experience where the[…]
Essays · French Cinema · Romance
What will become of Camilla? A character who is unsupported by theatrical context must cease to exist; when the curtain falls, the characters are unleashed from aesthetic dimensions. Renoir makes[…]
Experimental & Underground · Horror · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Romance
Whatever else it is, mother! is ultimately a woman’s anxious nightmare about what it feels like to put your heart and soul into creating something only for people to take[…]
Horror · Philosophy · Romance
Regardless of whether it is worth doing or not, people will continue to rely on memory as a way to create legacy and heritage. People will always leave things behind,[…]
Directors · Interviews · Romance
On The Love Witch: “I like to make films with a kind of dream logic. My films are a mix of reality and fantasy, or a mix of what is[…]
Keep the Change does something unusual, casting actors on the autism spectrum to play autistic roles. The strategy is already a success in its first outing – the film just[…]
Experimental & Underground · Romance · SF & Fantasy
Many have captured in equally luxurious fantasies the Beast that longs in men to be more than he is, and it is this Beast that Disney aims at literal children.[…]
With Kong: Skull Island making waves at the box office right now, perhaps it’s time to reintroduce ourselves to the first and, M. C. Myers argues (and we agree), best of the[…]
