Robert De Niro at Yale Again! The Good Shepherd: Poor Little Lamb!
Hey! How did we win the Cold War, anyway? Yale? Wasps? Homoerotic subtext? Do any of these spell Robert De Niro? I’m guessing no, but Bobby, in his second outing[…]
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Hey! How did we win the Cold War, anyway? Yale? Wasps? Homoerotic subtext? Do any of these spell Robert De Niro? I’m guessing no, but Bobby, in his second outing[…]
Night Train (Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1959) Call it Train of Fools. In Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s masterwork, a crowded night express travels overbooked with the despairing, the lovelorn, the lustful, a handful of priests[…]
Artists · Directors · Essays · Movies · Reviews
Beyond the queer readings of Strangers on a Train Men’s envy toward other men is a peculiarly anxiety-arousing topic and is rarely discussed, let alone openly admitted. Envy traditionally is deeply[…]
Getting down way down under You may not be aware of this yet — few Americans are — but Robin Williams likes black people. He also likes Latinos. And why[…]
“Hovering between treason and tribute . . .” Stephen Frears’ film The Queen starts with this quote from Henry V which announces that a whole Shakespearean drama is about to[…]
“Casablanca provides twenty-first-century Americans with an oasis of hope in a desert of arbitrary cruelty and senseless violence.” As we approach the sixty-fifth anniversary of Casablanca (1942), it is clear that[…]
“It’s sort of what we have instead of God” “. . . you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.” — Pauline Kael, Trash,[…]
Artists · Directors · Movies · Reviews
Life with the restless ghost of Orson Welles’ last movie In 1970, after two decades of European exile broken only by his brief return in 1957-58 to make Touch of[…]
Ted Tetzlaff brings Bobby Driscoll to the voyeur’s front window The Window (1949) is the kind of movie probably best experienced as a child of 11 or 12, plagued by[…]
Forget the book, just see the movie It’s a curious fact that today’s movie franchises are largely based on American comic books and English popular fiction.1 The Harry Potter series,[…]
“In Hustle, we can appreciate Nola’s (Taryn Manning) yearning to be more than a pimp’s pussy cash box …” Hmmmm … a film about a street hustling pimp with rap star[…]
When Leo met Bogy Can white people with regular features still save the world? Hey, we’re in Hollywood, aren’t we? The answer is not no. Blood Diamond serves up some[…]
Artists · Directors · Movies · Reviews
“Who are you? Where do you come from?” Fabián Bielinsky’s sudden death last summer makes an unfortunate backstory to his two features, The Aura and Nine Queens, yet even this[…]
Passion in a handful of dust Amanda: “Don’t you have a TV?” Martino: “No. Just movies.” Dopo Mezzanotte begins with sound and fury: a mysterious hero clad in black leather[…]
One virgin birth too many There are two reasons why I hate going to art films. The first is that everyone in the audience is as old as I am.[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
“Now, Goliath was a big man.” With the release of The Kid in 1921, Charlie Chaplin had fulfilled his dream of making a full-length comedy that would be recognized as[…]
Hey, we’re in Hollywood, aren’t we? The answer is not no. Blood Diamond serves up some of the grimmest images of modern Africa, young boys trained to be genocidal murderers,[…]
David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which runs 172 minutes, keeps collapsing in on itself. This is sure to frustrate most people, even Lynch fans. (I was not a big Lynch fan[…]
Genres · Movies · Noir · Noir · Reviews
All the colors of darkness When Cinemascope was introduced, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer hailed the process in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema. Rivette argued that Cinemascope freed the[…]
“He is an itinerant hero, a lone samurai whose mask is his blindness, a mask that hides his many strengths. I am always looking for new cinematic vistas. New directors,[…]
