The Birds, the Birds, and the Beatles
One of the delights of running a film review website is being able to repost an article just because we feel like it. Admittedly, we have many to choose from[…]
Category: Reviews
African American · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“The Greatest Film About Race Ever Filmed in Hollywood”: Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo
Editor’s note: Bob Keser passed away on Oct. 5, 2015, from cardiac arrest, age 72. Although we never met, he was an important member of the Bright Lights team and a[…]
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Horror · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Sexual Subversion: The Bride of Frankenstein
To celebrate Halloween, we repost your editor’s slightly revised analysis of James Whale’s immortal Bride of Frankenstein, which appeared previously on the site in 1997. * * * No institution[…]
African American · Drama · Melodrama · Reviews · Women in Film
Intimations of Lifelessness: Sirk’s Ironic Tearjerker
This article appeared first in our all-Sirk print issue (#6, Winter 1977) and was reposted in the March 1997 online version of Bright Lights. We present it here to celebrate[…]
Drama · Reviews · Thrillers & Action
Watch It Again! Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve
Ocean’s Twelve finds itself the black sheep of the trio, inspiring bewilderment and even scorn for its lax attitude toward typical genre beats and for its gutsy meta gambit, which[…]
Infinite Jest: The Big Lebowski
“What makes The Big Lebowski seem so circuitous is that, in moving from A to B to C, the plot keeps dawdling at points of interest along the way, stopping to admire the scenery before picking up and moving on. That’s essentially what Quintana and Brandt and Da Fino are: local color. It’s a movie about the pleasure of the journey, not the arrival at the destination.”
Celebrating National Pet Memorial Day (Sept. 13): Good Dog/Bad Dog: The Horror of Disney’s Old Yeller
Today, September 13 (the second Sunday of September), is National Pet Memorial Day, and we can’t think of a single cinematic pet more deserving of memorializing than that ill-fated, long-suffering[…]
A Tale of Two Bookshops: Sex and Books and The Big Sleep
We missed World Book Day (March 5) this year, but what the heck. In these challenging times, we celebrate all things literary anyway by re-presenting Paroma Chatterjee’s brilliant take on[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“Tolstoy and Only Tolstoy. Nothing Comes from Us”: Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1966-67) – Criterion Update
“What do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” – Henry James, from the preface of his novel The Tragic[…]
Composers · Historical & Epic · Reviews · Silents
Getting It Right the Second Time: Adapting Ben-Hur for the Screen
This is an updated and revised version of Gordon Thomas’s article first posted in Bright Lights in May 2006, reposted to celebrate Easter. * * * Bigger is better this[…]
Watch It Again! Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Hitchcock’s one-word titles have never been so instructive. Psycho is the feeling of being preyed on by your self, as by one of Norman’s stuffed birds. It is the primal[…]
The Not-So-Straight Story: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
Today – January 20 – is David Lynch’s birthday (he’s 71). To honor one of the true originals of le cinema moderne – and to remind ourselves of the importance[…]
Mia of the Spirits: Woody Allen’s Alice (1990)
Alice isn’t all high-concept reverie and mystical melancholy. After a series of self-consciously arthouse films and sombre homages – and bookended between Another Woman and Crimes and Misdemeanours on the[…]
Mexican Roadtrips: Güeros, Sicaros, and the Search for Mexico
Güeros is the story of a search without an object, and it offers an approach to making political art that dwells not in the illusion of authenticity, but in the[…]
Sh! The Horror! 13 Suggestions for an Uncommon Halloween Viewing Experience
Editor’s note: We’re posting Erich “Mr. Acidemic” Kuersten’s viewing guide a couple of days before Halloween to give our readers a chance to locate these “cool and strange” suggestions spanning cinema’s[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“Hundreds of Thousands of Hours of Moments”: On Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake (2015)
In a recent interview, the English filmmaker Adam Curtis described finding “hidden levels in the BBC archive” where a vast collection of extraneous footage has been accumulating over the last[…]
Dreams and Visions: Ingmar Bergman’s Kvinnodröm (Dreams) (1955)
A self-confessed conjurer, Bergman’s films are tricky in every sense. What makes these movies so difficult is what makes life itself difficult – the overwhelming desire to know the unknowable,[…]
Rosetta: Learning to See
Now she is finally able to “see” him back, to acknowledge the impact of her actions on another who cares for her, to accept their mutual obligations, and to entertain[…]
Directors · Drama · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Peace Out and Fuck You: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice
That Anderson chose to adhere so closely to the novel indicates a lack of desire to transform or elevate the work, and, regardless of whether or not this was motivated[…]
“I Never Felt So Much Like Christmas in All My Life”: Why You Should Make a Date with The Man Who Came to Dinner
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[…]
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