On and Off, On and Off: Riding Through Roger Rabbit’s World
There’s more trouble in Toontown than even the Toons imagined Cartoons and animated features have never been strictly made for children. But not until the 1960s did the cartoon gain[…]
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There’s more trouble in Toontown than even the Toons imagined Cartoons and animated features have never been strictly made for children. But not until the 1960s did the cartoon gain[…]
Ozpetek’s queer melodrama excites and disappoints in equal measure Italian cinema is finally discovering that films with gay and lesbian characters can do extremely well at the box-office, in spite[…]
America’s cultural colonizing is scored in a French-Canadian documentary you’ll probably never see Imagine if you walked into your local Starbucks and could only order caramel lattes. No cappuccinos, no[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“Let’s call the whole thing off?” Shall We Dance (1937) is the last and least of the great Fred & Ginger musicals, saved from ignominy by a superb score courtesy[…]
The searing images of the September 11 attacks initially prompted literal references to action movies, the only place most viewers had ever seen fireballs that size. The planners of these[…]
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
A treasure trove of short queer cinema – and one feature – from cultures where creating it can be a criminal act Despite its status as one of the world’s[…]
More relevant now than ever, this solid fest brings some of the complexity of the Arab world to often uncomprehending western eyes In San Francisco’s cornucopia of film festivals, Cinemayaat’s[…]
The Criterion Collection serves up two Sirk beauties With the 2001 release of All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, two gorgeous DVDs from the elite Criterion Collection,[…]
Murder and dinner – almost – among the upper crust Despite his godlike status as one of cinema’s great artists and rebels, Luis Buñuel has not been well served on DVD.[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Kern’s trashy teens fight and fuck their way through an incomprehensible world Transgression seems more like concept than reality in these no-boundaries days, but in the ‘80s and early ‘90s[…]
Historical & Epic · Reviews · Silents
The Borgias are having an orgy Old master Abel Gance directed this juicy potboiler of family values run amok as a frankly commercial job to put baguettes on the table.[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
The dude with the ‘tude “If Bob Dylan is a poet, so is Cassius Clay.” So sneered Norman Mailer in 1965, before he realized what the sixties were about, and[…]
The bad boys of classic Brit cinema pull out all the stops, maybe a couple too many In Craig McCall’s short documentary Painting with Light, included on Criterion’s fabulous DVD[…]
A French angst-fest mostly redeemed by Charlotte Rampling’s nuanced portrait of a woman unhinged François Ozon’s latest film will come as a bit of a shock to seasoned Ozon watchers,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Julia Roberts has pits! Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts are two of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Each has an annual income that oscillates comfortably from $20 million to $70[…]
Asian · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Ang Lee: third-wave feminist? The reviews of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have been positive – but the critics, somehow, seem more impressed by the trimmings than the turkey.[…]
Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Feminist screed or fetish-screwfest? Flip a coin Female revenge films aren’t exactly an unknown quantity, especially in the exploitation circuit. Pam Grier was one of the genre’s superstars in the[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Free-associating with a master of free cinema “Free cinema” has the dull ring of an oxymoron. The extreme level of control required and the mass of pressures that collide in[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China offers three documentaries for the price of one; Genghis Blues is too shaggy for words The collapse of Cold War rigidities and[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
This golden age is more like fool’s gold, but it has its thrills Even as a Brit, when I think of exploitation cinema, I tend to think of Roger Corman,[…]
