Crime · Directors · Drama · Historical & Epic
The animal is the only genuine thing in man. – Frank Wedekind * * * A woman sits rhythmically rocking by candlelight, her eyes focused on a distant point. Around[…]
Artists · Directors · Indies · LGBT & Queer · Mondo Culture · UFOs
Filmmaker Ralph Coon speaks frankly to Tony Conn about his cult UFO documentary, the hidden side of Hollywood, and doing heroin with Adam Parfrey. * * * Ralph Coon might[…]
Books · Crime · Directors · Drama · Franchises & Series · War
Coppola not only lived for his films but also lived in and through them, in a constant process of inventing and reinventing himself both as an artist and as a[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Drama · Labor
“There can be no resistance without memory or universalism” – Jean-Luc Godard, In Praise of Love (2001) * * * With his new feature, The Old Oak (2023), Ken Loach[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
“‘You can’t control life,’ he tells us in that film. ‘”It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only art you can control. Art and masturbation.'”
Activist & Political · Directors · French Cinema · New Genres · New Media
This impression of the look being “renewed” through the radical potential of video to sharpen one’s perception is vital to the core philosophy at the centre of Here and Elsewhere,[…]
André De Toth knew from the very beginning that he had to create a larger-than-life persona for him to be trusted with directing a picture. So he played the European[…]
Directors · Essays · Genres · Horror
Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933, making him 89 years old on this day in 2023. We mark the occasion – we won’t say celebrate – by republishing Elise[…]
Directors · Drama · Family · Writers & Critics
Right before the unnerving camping incident, Sammy has been told by his uncle Boris, who once tamed lions used in movies, that art is a dangerous undertaking and that it[…]
Books · Directors · Writers & Critics
It would be easy – and fun – to focus entirely on the good and to co-sign his [Tarantino’s] praise for films that are also favorites of mine such as[…]
Billy Wilder (1906-2002) died on March 27, age 95. We honor him by reposting Jason Carpenter’s fine analysis of the master’s work, first published in Bright Lights in 2016. *[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Women in Film
“[H]er favorite expression of strained intensity would be less quickly relieved by a merciful death than by Ex-Lax.”
Biopic · Directors · Experimental & Underground · War · Writers & Critics
I’m not interested in what happened next; I’m interested in what happens emotionally next. It’s like memory. Memory isn’t linear. It’s cyclical. A tiny thing can be the thing that’s[…]
Comedy · Communism and Socialism · Directors · Drama · Eastern European · Russia · War · Writers & Critics
Billy Wilder turned to these two plays because they offered the situations, structure, and characters that would allow his imagination to flower and create contemporary stories – a patriotic military[…]
Just as Holy Motors simultaneously mourned the loss of physicality from filmmaking while embracing the creative possibilities offered by digital technology, Annette is built on a seeming paradox: it plunges[…]
Directors · Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
Where Reid spends pages and pages absentmindedly ruminating on the many very painful, and very human, distinctions between Self and Other before losing himself in a tonal mess of relationship[…]
Directors · Gender · Hollywood · Horror · Men & Masculinity
If the sum of Spielberg’s work is about how men live in the world, Jaws is his most particular point on the subject, a film centered with almost fantastical totality[…]
Lester D. Friedman. Citizen Spielberg. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. $24.95. Calling him “our foremost practitioner of reel American history,” Friedman draws our attention to Spielberg’s determination[…]
David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation, edited by Matthew Sorrento and David Ryan. 259 pp. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2022. 2007 was a good year for American film, with[…]
The unfinished projects to which Welles devoted his energies began in July 1961. This was exactly twenty-five years after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the year in which[…]
