Bugis Street (Yonfan, 1995)
A bittersweet look at the daily lives of the tranny whores of a legendary red-light district of 1960s Singapore – with free make-up tips! This sweet, sad sketch of a[…]
Category: Reviews
Animation · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
A Crazy Cake: Jan Svankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure (1997)
Noodles up the nose, murdered dolls, toe-sucking fish – these are the hallmarks of Prague’s zaniest surrealist! Forget magic realism; this is magic surrealism, of the highest order. Czech filmmaker[…]
Opera Queens: Werner Schroeter’s Love’s Debris (1996)
Thrill as the withered opera hags revisit their vital past! Scream as the mock-incestuous-lesbian sisters kiss and waltz! Shudder as hunky baritone Sergei Larin makes goo-goo eyes at a twink![…]
Queer Love: Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger’s Boyfriends (1996)
This sweet, sad queer ensemble piece from Britain surpasses its more pompous American counterparts. The bitchy, bittersweet gay ensemble movie of the pre-2000 era, e.g., The Boys in the Band or[…]
Marginalism in Andrew Davis’s The Fugitive (1993)
A bottle of “Black & Beautiful” hair dye gives Harrison Ford his ticket to the demimonde When I saw The Fugitive, I watched it with a particularly critical eye. Earlier,[…]
Beautiful, Empty Spaces: Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963)
If Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and Fritz Lang aren’t enough of a lure, how about all those beautiful empty spaces? Few observers at the time (1963) were prepared for Godard,[…]
Queer Kisses: The Cinematic Taboo Before 2000
What is it about the sight of two men kissing that drives Americans insane? Frank Oz’s In and Out can be read on one level as an attempt to relocate[…]
Hong Kong Films, 1997: Enjoy Yourself To-Night, Final Justice, Midnight Zone, Once Upon a Time in China and America
“I refuse to fever in the lousy ballroom of Mongkok!” Hong Kong cinema is in clear disarray with the transfer to China, a star system in virtual collapse, talent dispersing[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Producers & Studios · Reviews
Albert Zugsmith’s Opium Dreams: Confessions of an Opium Eater
Can one man’s brain contain Written on the Wind, The Incredible Shrinking Man, LSD, I Hate You!, and Confessions of an Opium Eater? If the man is Albert Zugsmith it could.[…]
Worshipping Delon: Queer Notes on Rene Clement’s Purple Noon
Noon isn’t the only thing that’s purple in this continental ode to Alain Delon’s crotch. Some “classics” earn that status from innovative mise en scene, others from memorable performances, still[…]
Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Queer Documentary: Gay USA (1978)
Queer activism circa 1978 showed a diverse optimistic community moving ever closer to unity — before the body blow of AIDS. Porn directors aren’t usually known for their political consciousness;[…]
Trans-itions: Richard Spence’s Different for Girls (1996)
In a cinema crowded with self-conscious transgressions, Kim offers the real article when she strips to show her straight boyfriend the thrilling secrets of the altered body. Transsexual imagery has typically[…]
Asian · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Bending the Gender Till It Breaks: Hong Kong’s Who’s the Man? Series
Hong Kong’s gender-benders are the stuff of legend; director Patrick Chan adds two key works to the canon in these 1996 bookend satires of fame, pop music, and forbidden kisses.[…]
“The Same Paranoid Space”: Nicholas Roeg’s Two Deaths
Roeg drags us into a nightmare of sophisticated sadomasochism – and we don’t object Nicholas Roeg’s new film opens with images of disconnected body parts – a man’s leg washed[…]
Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971)
“His Finzi-Continis, set in the years 1938 to 1943, is an autumnal work in two senses – the subject is the last golden flash of freedom before one of history’s major tragedies,[…]
Combat Autopsy: Raoul Walsh’s The Naked and the Dead
“What is most disturbing about all of this is the straight, uninflected manner in which Walsh visualizes the story.” Writers on film rarely discuss the combat genre and, when they do, they[…]
Last Laugh: Was Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Vertigo a Private Joke?
“On one level, Vertigo bewitches us with eerie fascination; on another, it leads us on a wild goose chase in search of Scottie’s character. But could the latter really have been Hitchcock’s[…]
Tsui Hark’s The Blade (1995)
“The Blade is the director’s paean to the muscular, exposed male body and a virtual catalog of ways to assault it – pummeling, whipping, biting, beating, and hacking . . .” Tsui Hark’s[…]
Patrick Leung’s Beyond Hypothermia (1996)
“Her mechanistic thinking precludes her from pursuing the noodle vendor in the usual ways; she can only see him after she has killed, and her sudden appearances and disappearances in[…]
African American · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Afro Promo: Jenni Olsen’s Survey of Black Cinema Trailers 1946-1976 on DVD
“America consistently countered the growing concepts of black pride and power with a virtual army of self-sacrificing mammy figures (both male and female), pimps, whores, ‘great black hopes,’ and the[…]
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