THANK YOU FOR SMIRKING
Hollywoodland is hardly the first film to feature a brace of matinee idols who smirk with all the confidence of the well-paid (consult most buddy movies starting with Butch Cassidy[…]
SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming · Writers & Critics
JOSEPH STEFANO (1922 – 2006)
Playwright. Screenwriter. Producer. Known primarily for two major achievments: (1) He wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). (2) He was the producer and chief writer for the first[…]
Chimp versus film critic: which is smarter?
You know the old gag: set a dozen chimpanzees in front of a set of typewriters, and sooner or later they would type out every sentence in the English language,[…]
Success Breeds Confidence: Korean Movies at the NYAFF
A quartet of recent Korean films shows a reassuringly robust national cinema Over the last six years, the New York Asian Film Festival has done a great service to Asian[…]
Quickies: Random Short Reviews from Cycles of Porn to Small Faces
“Turn towards me. I’ll make do with your heart beating next to mine.” Cycles of Porn: Sex/Life in L.A. Part 2 (Jochen Hick, 2005) Fans of the gay porn documentary[…]
“How My Brain Works”: An Interview with Michel Gondry
“I didn’t want to live under the shadow of other films. I want to exist on my own.” Introduction Like a mashup of cinematic countrymen Georges Melies and Jacques Tati,[…]
Acts of Revenge: Director Park Chan-wook Discusses Lady Vengeance and More
Grand Guignol, Korean style Introduction One of Korea’s most commercially successful young directors, Park Chan-wook is a polarizing figure in the disputatious world of international film circles. Though most acknowledge[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Abstract Film Palimpsests: On the Work of Rey Parla
pa·limp·sest: n., Writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased; something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
A Frontline Guy: An Interview with Burt Young
“Get Burt!” Introduction For too many people, Burt Young is simply “That Guy from Rocky,” but to a cult that’s included the likes of Actor’s Studio founder Lee Strasberg, Sergio[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Mish-Mash Planet: The Cult of Rita Hayworth in You Were Never Lovelier
“Speaking of impurity: what was Rita Hayworth’s image supposed to be in the ’40s?” What did we use to think of other countries? The question occurred to me while watching[…]
Clouds and Scattered Sun: Kelly and Donen’s It’s Always Fair Weather
“Shot in earthbound Eastman color, It’s Always Fair Weather doesn’t look or feel like the Technicolor froth that preceded it.” There’s a scene in the 1949 musical On the Town when Frank[…]
Young Vampires in Love: Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark
Not the usual suspects Way back in 1987, two vampire movies were released within a few months of each other. The first was Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, a big[…]
Better Living Through Chemistry? On Fassbinder’s Forgotten Masterpiece, Fear of Fear
“Fassbinder’s probing camera shows us what the doctors fail to see . . .” Rainer Werner Fassbinder accurately predicted the rise of the “medicated society” in his 1975 film Angst[…]
Death Becomes Him: Robert Altman’s Prairie Home Companion
In which Altman doesn’t go gentle into that good night Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, based in part on Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio show, observes the last stand of[…]
Carpe Keillor: Nashville Director Finds Longtime Companion
“Singing is the only thing that puts me right.” Rush Limbaugh and his abusive ilk notwithstanding, radio as a medium is tolerant, forgiving and kind. To air on radio is[…]
The Don Goes Digital: Don Giovanni — Mozart’s Dramma Giocosa for the Ages
Jürgen Flimm and Brian Large supply a stage production that lives on DVD A stage production that doesn’t look stagy on home video? I said it couldn’t be done, more[…]
Finding the Funny, One Dick Joke at a Time: Comedy Central’s Pam Anderson Roast on DVD
Enough engorged vagina jokes to feed a family of four for an entire year! Some pleasures — a blow job from Angelina Jolie, for example1 — lie permanently out of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Forbidden Fruit? Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible III
Is it a sin to see this film? There is no doubt that Tom Cruise is guilty of acting like a movie star in public. He’s jumped on Oprah’s couch,[…]
Woody Allen, Misanthropy, and Match Point: Or How Death Got the Last Laugh
Welcome to the “nihilistic message movie” “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my works. I want to achieve it by not dying.” . . . “I don’t mind dying,[…]
School Daze: The Curious Young Girls of Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence
“Don’t resist, my dear.” Knowing that Lucile Hadzihalilovic is the partner of Gaspar Noé — he of the 10-minute one-take rape scene in the brutalist Irréversible (2002) — might make[…]
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