The year is 1987. Wall Street smoothie Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is preparing to meet the new day. As he anoints his buff-enough-for-Bay-Watch bod with an endless series of unguents, emollients,[…]
The pleasures and pitfalls of cultural change, collectivism, and – oh yes, an unusual pair of cats As the new century begins, it is now possible to look back on[…]
Fred and Ginger get continental on your ass The Gay Divorcee1 is the quintessential Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. It’s not their best – largely because Ginger’s dancing skills[…]
Going down in San Francisco’s street-kid heroin underground Behind the image of San Francisco as a creative epicenter and ultimate party town drawing talented, disaffected kids from around the country[…]
This just in – men are stupid. “It is useless,” Dr. Johnson1 once remarked, “to criticize an unresisting imbecility.” He was referring, of course, to Carrot Top’s act, but his[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · Reviews
An acclaimed auteur’s new film gets caught in the cultural crossfire. Author’s Statement In February this year I traveled to India to work as a camera assistant on the film[…]
“All right, which one of you took the lesbian?” In 1935, the movie producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights to Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, intending to turn the[…]
It’s really a courtly epic in ’60s drag. It was a coup that Columbia Pictures had banked on: the one 007 property that got away from Broccoli and Saltzman’s cash[…]
Hitch’s – and by now the whole damn culture’s – seminal Oedipal nightmare revisited Read the companion photo essay “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone”[…]
“What would you give me for a basket of dead lovebirds?” The Bad Seed came out in 1956, the same year as Carousel and Tea and Sympathy. But while the[…]
The cruelty and clarity of life in a sand pit in Japan, circa 1964 Revisiting past pleasures – long-past pleasures in this case – has its particular perils. In the[…]
Dykes in distress in Robert Aldrich’s late ‘60s masterpiece Robert Aldrich ranks with Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray as one of the “golden boys” of postwar commercial cinema whose formal[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Can your heart stand it? More Radley Metzger! The title of Metzger’s “second film” (second by his own reckoning; other sources list it as his fourth, after Dark Odyssey, The[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
What do Sasquatch droppings and flying saucers have in common? George Kuchar, of course. Underground film impresario Jack Stevenson tells the story of how George Kuchar dealt with a problem[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
The eminent Swiss documentarian looks at saints and sinners of history – without saying which are which “My films revolve around absence,” Swiss documentarian Richard Dindo has said, but the[…]
Making art in the most unlikely circumstances Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) was one of many beneficiaries of the wave of auteurism that galvanized critics in France in the 1950s and[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Plan 9 from Outer Space; Glen or Glenda; Jail Bait; Bride of the Monster One of my fondest memories of a communal movie experience is seeing my first Ed Wood[…]
The kids are not all right! Riot girls have a long and noble history that extends far back beyond Hole and Courtney Love. No doubt the experts in this realm[…]
Crime · Noir · Reviews · Uncategorized
Good golly, Mr. Holly! In one of the many extras in Criterion’s sumptuous DVD presentation of Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Peter Bogdanovich calls the film “the greatest non-auteur film[…]
The film suffered almost as much as Joan before arriving in a gorgeous DVD. In spite of the hype, DVD is more often promise than fulfillment. Many, perhaps most, of[…]
