Actors & Personalities · Reviews
“Speaking of impurity: what was Rita Hayworth’s image supposed to be in the ’40s?” What did we use to think of other countries? The question occurred to me while watching[…]
“Shot in earthbound Eastman color, It’s Always Fair Weather doesn’t look or feel like the Technicolor froth that preceded it.” There’s a scene in the 1949 musical On the Town when Frank[…]
Not the usual suspects Way back in 1987, two vampire movies were released within a few months of each other. The first was Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, a big[…]
“Fassbinder’s probing camera shows us what the doctors fail to see . . .” Rainer Werner Fassbinder accurately predicted the rise of the “medicated society” in his 1975 film Angst[…]
In which Altman doesn’t go gentle into that good night Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, based in part on Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio show, observes the last stand of[…]
“Singing is the only thing that puts me right.” Rush Limbaugh and his abusive ilk notwithstanding, radio as a medium is tolerant, forgiving and kind. To air on radio is[…]
Jürgen Flimm and Brian Large supply a stage production that lives on DVD A stage production that doesn’t look stagy on home video? I said it couldn’t be done, more[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Is it a sin to see this film? There is no doubt that Tom Cruise is guilty of acting like a movie star in public. He’s jumped on Oprah’s couch,[…]
Welcome to the “nihilistic message movie” “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my works. I want to achieve it by not dying.” . . . “I don’t mind dying,[…]
“Don’t resist, my dear.” Knowing that Lucile Hadzihalilovic is the partner of Gaspar Noé — he of the 10-minute one-take rape scene in the brutalist Irréversible (2002) — might make[…]
“You’re making fashion history” — not! Is it possible to have a size 4 ass without a size 4 soul? Nuh-uh, says Hollywood, which knows a lot about both, in[…]
Do not be alarmed, monsieur. We come from France. We are here to eat your sausages. Is France as fucked up as the U.S.? According to Pierre Morel, the answer[…]
So middle of the road you can’t see the fucking curb Jazz for people who hate jazz? Who needs it? Chinese food for people who don’t eat Chinese? No way![…]
“Glassman uncovers networks of influence and inference, whole microhistories around the camera . . . “ Interviewed by Peter Cowie for Cowie’s book Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in[…]
“The film is a kind of subtle argumentation by analogy, whose success rests on the viewer’s desire to identify with Gore.” Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth may get the honor[…]
Antonioni’s early masterpiece looks better than ever More and more, DVD is in the position of resuscitating and saving a director’s reputation, or at the least reminding us and keeping[…]
“Why is Fassbinder allowed this aesthetic duplicity in the melodramas but not in Querelle?” When the titular hero of Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest allows himself to be fucked for the[…]
Deleuze, Marcuse, Bahktin, Dodger, Juice, Valerie Vomit . . . Only a few years ago, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain was accepted as the most influential work in 20th-century art, by a[…]
“In films these days, people are hardly ever ‘taken’ by others — they don’t strike up sudden affinities, or become voluptuously intrigued by enemies.” In the 1940s, it was quite[…]
“Whether alone or with others, you live with yourself.” Like Jean-Pierre Melville, Albert Camus was a young man active in the French Resistance, during which he wrote editorials for the[…]
