Dixiana on DVD: Has Everything but Bill Robinson’s Feet
Where’s the rest of him? Why, Roan Group Archival Entertainment, why? Why did you go to the trouble of restoring the thoroughly lame 1930 musical Dixiana and then fail to[…]
Category: Reviews
Gore Galore: Takashi Miike’s Audition
This is one audition you may want to skip Reports from the front lines of early cinema suggest that many viewers during the ‘teens and before were terrified by the[…]
Mr. Belvedere Joins the Scouts: Mister Scoutmaster’s Man-Boy Love
What’s going on in that tent? At a time when the Boy Scouts of America is reeling from the backlash,1 and the backlash to the backlash,2 to the Supreme Court’s[…]
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[…]
Gay Pride, Italian Style: Ferzan Ozpetek’s Le Fate Ignoranti (Ignorant Fairies)
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[…]
Occupied Territory: Sylvie Groulx’s In the Shadow of Hollywood
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
Fred and Ginger Miss a Step in Shall We Dance
“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[…]
La Vie en Rage: Rampaging Women in Five French-Language Films: Les Voleurs; Regarde la Mer; Dreamlife of Angels; Rosetta; Baise-moi
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[…]
A Divine Wallow: All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind on Criterion DVD
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,[…]
Buñuel on DVD: Diary of a Chambermaid and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
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
Snapshots from Hell: Richard Kern – The Hardcore Collection on DVD
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
Behind the Brocade: Abel Gance’s Lucrezia Borgia
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
Bob Dylan in D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967)
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[…]
Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947)
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[…]
Buried Alive: François Ozon’s Under the Sand (2000)
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
Brad and Julia Go South in The Mexican
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
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Art Film Hidden Inside the Chop-Socky Flick
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
The Girls Can’t Help It: Baise-Moi (2000)
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
Sweet Movies: Four by Dusan Makavejev: Man Is Not a Bird; WR: Mysteries of the Organism; Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator; Innocence Unprotected
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
Feedback from the Global Village: Culture Docs
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[…]
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