Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLgx38t7AQ4] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAdAixzYq-k] Thank you, Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon, for giving me an excuse to write about José Mojica Marins, the Brazilian screenwriter, director, and star of films every bit[…]
Why Ten Days’ Wonder? I certainly wouldn’t call it one of Chabrol’s masterpieces. That’s a description I’d reserve for Les Bonnes Femmes, Le Boucher, Ã Double Tour, La Rupture, The[…]
In case you’re asleep at your desk (like me) I should tell you there’s a whole Chabrolian hooplah going on over at the amazing Flickhead! I’ve always liked Chabrol’s weird[…]
The post before last made me unearth these notes I once wrote after first seeing the film. Maybe they’ll add a little something here. Although from a stylistic perspective[…]
[My Dinner with André comes out on DVD from the Criterion Collection on Tuesday] Watching My Dinner with André for the first time at age 15 was my introduction not[…]
The first is a supernatural horror film. The second is a horror story without any trace of the supernatural. Otherwise, they are remarkably similar. Both apply the horror film’s fundamental[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
How can anyone not marvel that two of Gothic Cinema’s greatest performers, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price, were born on the same day? Christopher Lee was born on May 27,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Reviews
Reading Joseph Aisenberg’s excellent piece (below) I’m compelled to offer my understanding of the great Von Sternberg’s stylistic obsessiveness, especially since it’s something I understand and share. (This began as[…]
Maybe this has happened to you: you’re watching a film, dum de dum, suddenly… METHOD! Where did it come from and where does it go when it’s gone? Let’s take[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Once upon a time a strange sassy redhead with a big nose and giant lips cropped up as a pathetic obsessed fan in Martin Scorcese’s heavy-handed satire The King of[…]
The 1970s remains, in my experience at any rate, the pinnacle for mainstream liberal understanding of slavery and the African American experience. As a child I remember being blown completely[…]
Film Criticism 101: Why You Should Recycle the Promo Packet To be sure, there are many distinct methods of film criticism that might be employed with equal, and mutually exclusive,[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground
“Avant garde filmmaking has been defined almost entirely in opposition to the Hollywood mainstream.”
Hobson’s Choice (David Lean, 1954) Approaching this film — one of two comedies Lean made in his career, the other being Blithe Spirit (1945) — you expect it to be[…]
One of the world’s largest cinema events is also one of the most ambitious
“What happens when the gaze is returned?”
Note: The humble program note has a long and noble history. Sometimes anonymous, sometimes not, cheered as often as they were reviled, these brief, ephemeral, often illuminating handouts, likely destined for the dustbin the same night they appeared, offer “wisdom in a nutshell,” as one of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s characters aptly put it. This article is the second in Bright Lights’ series of vintage program notes from those heady days of the 1970s when unstoppable auteurists started their own cine clubs and commandeered movie theaters to bring their idea of cine-culture to audiences. Our late friend Roger McNiven continues the series with fascinating write-ups of two more works on the subject of “women larger than life,” in this case Allan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet and The Woman They Almost Lynched, screened at the legendary Thalia Theatre in New York City on Tuesday, December 4, 1979. We have added images but not edited the text, deferring to the time and spirit in which it was written.
Kicking off the second pre-code set to come out this year, we’ve got THE CHEAT (1931, another in the “rich ne’er do well offers to ‘help’ married woman” genre. This[…]
This weekend, it being lovely and all, why not go to the movies and see OBSERVE AND REPORT? The film needs money. Writer-director Jody Hill is getting a drubbing apparently,[…]
