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[…]
Category: Reviews
Still Breathing: Ana Kokkinos’s Head On
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,[…]
Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love
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
Hell in the Heartland: Boys Don’t Cry
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
Wojciech Has’s The Saragossa Manuscript
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[…]
Worthy of the Slaughter? On Saving Private Ryan
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.”[…]
Percolating Paranoia: Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat
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
Roger Corman’s New World Pictures: Notes Toward a Lexicon
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
American Independent Narrative Cinema of the ’60s: A Brief Survey (Courtesy of the 1992 Torino Film Festival)
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.[…]
Shifting Sexualities: Bedrooms and Hallways
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
Fred and Ginger Take Off: Flying Down to Rio
“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[…]
Deadly Crawl: The Velocity of Gary
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[…]
American Beauty: Why It Sucks and Why the Critics Love It
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[…]
Unhappy, Critic: Happy, Texas
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[…]
Draining the Drama: Simon Shore’s Get Real
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[…]
All Roads Lead to Love: Tanya Wexler’s Finding North
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[…]
Beatnik Chic: Chuck Workman’s The Source
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[…]
Tragic Poignancy: Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Loyal 47 Ronin
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[…]
Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin’s Little Fugitive Escapes to DVD
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[…]
Antonioni’s Red Desert
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[…]
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