Life Is … Pretty Good: Hermine Huntgeburth’s The Trio
Criminal high jinks with a different kind of family Family, aka “the F word,” comes in many forms, or so says Hermine Huntgeburth’s bittersweet black comedy The Trio (1998). This[…]
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Criminal high jinks with a different kind of family Family, aka “the F word,” comes in many forms, or so says Hermine Huntgeburth’s bittersweet black comedy The Trio (1998). This[…]
Ari’s a mess – it’s in his kiss Ana Kokkinos’s debut feature Head On was one of the more distinctive entries in San Francisco’s 1999 Lesbian and Gay Film Festival,[…]
Teenage lesbians gleefully terrorize Sweden Mention teenage love and lust, and images immediately arise of tabloid TV shows and creepy Internet chat rooms overrun by drooling chicken hawks and FBI[…]
Crime · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
These boys do, and so do the girls The credits for Boys Don’t Cry list “Killer Films” as one of the production companies, and that’s as apt a description of[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
The legendary head flick from the ’60s in a polished new print “Head movies” – those mind-bending epics like 2001 or El Topo that are supposedly best viewed under the[…]
It’s not just Ryan who needs saving. My friend Kevin and I were lingering over one too many bourbons. The jukebox was playing “What If God Was One of Us.”[…]
Fritz Lang brings the terrors of noir into the bright kitchens of America. Watch that coffee pot! In Bright Lights 12 devoted to film noir, Gary Morris locates the malaise[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Producers & Studios · Reviews
The beloved low-budget exploitation company sampled New World Pictures (1970-1983) was the brainchild of Roger Corman. It was his second attempt (after The Filmgroup in the early ’60s) to run[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
What better way to attack the monolith of social/sexual repression than by attacking the “sanctity” of the linear narrative? “The Official cinema of the world has run out of breath.[…]
The Go Fish queen goes fishing again – this time for gay boys and the men and women who love them Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994) was one of the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“Hey fella, twirl that old propella” Hollywood producer Merriam Cooper loved three things: airplanes, the tropics, and giant gorillas.1 In Flying Down to Rio, Cooper’s 1933 airborne musical, he went[…]
The “velocity” of this misguided AIDS drama never materializes Director Dan Ireland made an impressive debut in 1997 with The Whole Wide World, a sleeper about the 1930s pulp writer[…]
Okay, American Beauty is shallow, pretentious, smug, condescending, and parochial. It radiates the traditional show-biz contempt for the talent-free slobs who inhabit American small towns and suburbia, cut off from[…]
Mark Illsley’s dicey debut feature about faux gay cons in the hideous heartland One sign of the maturing of a community is its ability to laugh at itself, something that[…]
This mixed-bag British coming out drama doesn’t quite come out. A film with scenes of a trim 16-year-old schoolboy dawdling decoratively outside a public toilet hoping a trick will stroll[…]
A good-natured low-budget road movie with a queer twist With occasional exceptions like Philadelphia, the “AIDS movie” has been mostly a ghetto genre, so much so that many of these[…]
An uneven new documentary looks at all things Beat. The Beats have returned with a vengeance. New editions of On the Road are rolling off the presses; interest in Allen[…]
The great director’s legendary version of Chushingura is finally available in a sparkling DVD transfer Genroku Chushingura, also known as The Forty-Seven Ronin of the Genroku Era, or in the[…]
A breakthrough indie and a crash course in no-budget film production Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin’s groundbreaking 1953 indie, Little Fugitive (reviewed more extensively elsewhere in Bright Lights, along with[…]
The Italian maestro’s stroll through the modern wasteland Red Desert occupies a curious place in Antonioni’s canon. Made in 1964 as a French-Italian coproduction, it’s wedged between the international success[…]
