Sometimes, the personal angle offers the clearest view. Now and then, the authorial “we” must be abandoned in favour of a more open-handed, first-person approach. Therefore, I’ll begin by saying[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Directors · Reviews
“Do the Right Thing ends the morning after Radio Raheem’s death, but we have enough details to know how the rest of the narrative will play out. Radio Raheem was[…]
I decided to review this massive collection as some kind of masochistic indulgence, and truly it’s been a long, soul-warping, awe-inspiring yet deeply troubling, at times maddeningly boring, 25+ hours[…]
A respectable and due measure of column inches has been devoted to Pawel Pawlikowski’s latest film, Ida, but as the director himself has intimated, much of it has concentrated on[…]
“Certainly Kit’s story, like that of Charles Starkweather and indeed, that of Warshow’s gangsters, will end in his solitary demise, precisely because his actions have set him apart from others.[…]
“The notion that four nineteen-year-olds pledge to kill themselves if they, in essence, grow up, and then having grown up discover that adult life is nothing but misery and so[…]
Actors & Personalities · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, W. C. Fields, Ben Turpin – the gang’s all here. Flicker Alley, a home video company founded in 2007, is not solely dedicated[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Festivals & Awards
The Fifth Odessa International Film Festival was destined to be unlike its previous editions. Only two months previously, Odessa suffered an unprecedented peak in civil violence with the death of[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · Reviews
“Something is rotten in the state of Kashmir” – Improvising Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has taken rather long for a feature film set in Kashmir to get critical acclaim for its[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part,[…]
Directors · Festivals & Awards
“As directors such as Godard, Herzog, and Wenders take on 3D, we sense that for this generation of the avant-garde, the goal is no longer to test the audience’s reliance[…]
Orson Welles’s Too Much Johnson is a youthful tribute to low comedy and reflects of his obsession with bygone times, cultural mores & means of expression.
Directors · Documentaries · Reviews · Writers & Critics
“Jodorowsky capitalizes on the cachet of exclusivity, the wonderful feeling of being one of the elite few who “get it,” and, in treating it like a source of esoteric wisdom,[…]
Note: Criterion has just released (August 12, 2014) Love Streams in a dual-format DVD/Blu-ray edition. See end of this article for details on extras. * * * “Every picture should[…]
This review of L.A. Confidential first appeared in Bright Lights in May 1998. We’ve always been fond of this piece, and are happy to repost it now, not least because[…]
“Based on the sample of crowdfunded films at BAM, “public” funding in a country where public, government funding for arts is rapidly diminishing and has long since paled in comparison[…]
“What if the birds’ extreme proximity to human beings and, particularly to Melanie, bespeaks not conflict but fascination, admiration, and – I shall just go ahead and say it –[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Horror · Reviews
“I can always make something work, if I have a camera.” – John Landis There are two John Landises. There’s the director equally at home with comedy as he is[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
“As the divide between rich and poor became more extreme, late 20th-century cinema required a new approach to achieve the same end: portraying the existence of the wealthy elite as[…]
“Inherent to defamiliarization or riddling is, of course, a process of refamiliarization: as the film proceeds, we wish to see the strange normalized, the riddle answered. But in The House with Laughing[…]
