Three Masters: Spielberg, Anderson, Haneke, and Their Audience
Is the filmmaker tyrant, aesthete, ringmaster, or hermit? For whom does an artist create? It is a question frequently put, perhaps more to writers than to others, and perhaps the[…]
Category: Reviews
Godzilla #1: Godzilla ex Machina: Taking All the Fight out of Humanity
“If Godzilla is not benevolent but merely indifferent, then his mercy amounts to that of a man sidestepping an anthill instead of trampling it under his heel.” Conventional academic and[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
The American Epidemic: AIDS in (Recent) Cinema and History
Discussed in this essay: The Battle of AmFar (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2013); Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013); How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012); The Normal[…]
Activist & Political · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
“Politics Is Theatre”: On Narimane Mari’s Bloody Beans (Loubia Hamra) (2014)
“It’s not blood, it’s red” – Jean-Luc Godard A few weeks ago Abdelaziz Bouteflika was re-elected for a fourth time as president of Algeria with 81.5% of the vote. Most[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Could You Spare Me a Nightmare? The World of Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)
In honor of Vincent Price’s birthday (May 27, 1911-October 25, 1993), we present Sean Nortz’s thrilling exegesis of one of the actor’s most intriguing and downright bizarre films. (After this piece[…]
Animation · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Private Snafu’s Hidden War: Historical Survey and Analytical Perspective
In honor of Memorial Day, we present Christopher Dow’s lively history and critical analysis of World War II’s favorite cartoon fuck-up, Private Snafu, which appeared originally in Bright Lights in[…]
John Krokidas’ Kill Your Darlings: An Origin Story of the Beats
“[Jack] Kerouac declared in his preface to Galloway that the young artist ‘is colored by his symbols. His hue is vivid: he postures.’ This because the artist is in growth,[…]
Private (and Public) Traps: Truman Burbank’s Audiences in The Truman Show
“Are we trapped like Truman? Is this why we want him to leave his world? Then what will we do? Turn off the set? Leave our society with its endless[…]
Gay Old San Francisco: Hitchcock’s Closet Case and Other Thoughts on Vertigo
“Could Scottie’s real beau ideal be Gavin Elster?” Vertigo is famously about obsession. Brian Da Palma’s homage/rip-off is even called Obsession. But what is Scottie’s obsession, really? San Francisco’s past[…]
Found Footage Horror #1: The Dead Rising: Aspects of Spectrality in the Vicious Brothers’ Grave Encounters
This is the first of two articles riffing on found footage horror and new media. The second is Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s “Found Footage Horror #2: Textures of Silence and Decay: Marble Hornets and[…]
Move Over, Godzilla! Killer Bugs, Babes, and Beasts in 1950s Drive-in Cinema
With the latest version of Godzilla opening on May 16, we were reminded of other 1950s drive-in “classics” featuring everything from irradiated giant bugs to women on other planets who look suspiciously[…]
Flashback 2008: Heartbreak in a Pan: 25 Seconds in Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy
We at Bright Lights continue our celebration of Be Kind to Animals Week with this brief revisit to Wendy and Lucy, specifically a brief, evocative lateral pan that follows Wendy’s[…]
What a Way to Go! Shirley MacLaine, the 1960s, and How Hollywood Learned to Start Worrying and Fear the Bomb
Who’d have dreamed that the 1960s were as dumb as the 1990s? And that Shirley MacLaine was the transitional figure between the serious 1950s and the brainless decade that followed?[…]
Cinco de Mayo Fun! Ninón Sevilla Gets Down in the 1950 Mexican Musical Melodrama Aventurera
Cabaret or whorehouse? If only poor Elena had known the difference! In the late 1940s, Mexico experienced an economic boom that shifted the cultural and artistic energy from country life — the[…]
Pablo Ferro’s Title Montage for Bullitt (1968): The Criminality Beneath the Surface of Civil Society
While Bullitt (1968) is better known for its extended automobile chase sequence through the streets of San Francisco, the film is also a carefully written detective story in the same[…]
The Taste of Greasepaint: On Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel and Ozu’s Floating Weeds
The Bergman film is much darker, and examines – with sadistic, Strindbergian zeal – the cruelties that men and women inflict on one other when love is distorted by power.[…]
The Greatest Beauty: The Imaginary Journey of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza), 2013
Sorrentino’s award-winning drama opens with a quote from Céline‘s Journey to the End of the Night: “To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Reviews · Silents
Easter 2014, Part Un: A Tale of Two Kings: DeMille’s Silent Classic on DVD — in Both Versions
For many of us, cinema long ago replaced religion, but why not combine the two by celebrating Easter with a reading of Gordon Thomas’s study of King of Kings, part “un” of[…]
“Old Dog, New Tricks”: Resurrecting James Bond in Skyfall
Bond has long served as a cipher for the British nation; therefore his personal struggle also exposes cultural anxiety about Britain’s waning global influence and increasing vulnerability in the twenty-first[…]
Men in Peril, Hollywood, & Our Culture’s Skewed Portrayal of Heart Disease
“An ill heart, expressive of character rather than culture, guarantees three things. First, by holding the individual responsible, the largest offenders, diet and a sedentary populace, are given a pass.[…]
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