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Documentaries · Exploitation & Erotica
Livin’ large with the Hung One Porn has had its share of superstars, but none were bigger – in every sense – than John Holmes. This “little boy with a[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
The illustrious history of the king of the hepcats (and the queen of deadpan) Louis Prima and his wife Keely Smith were a staple of ’50s and ’60s variety TV,[…]
“I guess it all works if you revere Stephen Sondheim.” Have you been kicking yourself ever since May 3, 1970, when you weren’t there for the marathon recording session that[…]
“Some of the mise-en-scene has a suffocating beauty, as in the bravura marriage sequence where the screen is clogged to the breaking point with images – a strategy that shows[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“Shall we take it straight through?” Swing Time is the last Fred & Ginger musical to have it all – lots of great songs from Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields,[…]
Asian · Historical & Epic · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Truly subversive or mere cinematic “seasoning,” in the director’s own phrase? I am the first to admit that Oshima Nagisa’s Gohatto (1999, more literally “Against the Law,” but titillatingly translated[…]
My Son Divine, by Frances Milstead, with Kevin Heffernan and Steve Yeager. New York: Alyson Books, 2001. 256 pages, $18.95. ISBN 1555835945 Divine has been dead for 13 years, and[…]
The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece, by Jan Stuart. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. 366 pages, $26.00 Fans of 1975’s Nashville, of which there are many, have reasons[…]
Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mick LaSalle. Thomas Dunne Books, 279 pages, $24.95. While hardly a household word, even among some cinephiles, pre-Code cinema — those “naughty” Hollywood[…]
On Cukor, by Gavin Lambert, edited by Robert Trachtenberg. Rizzoli, 208 pp., $50.00. One day in the early 1980s, George Cukor, the octogenarian director of such celebrated Hollywood films as Dinner at[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Abigail Child’s compulsive visual collages are visual and aural legerdemain Since the 1970s, experimental filmmaker and poet Abigail Child has been engaged in a kind of cultural archaeology. Unearthing found[…]
Some bright lights and a few dim bulbs distinguish this year’s preeminent indie showcase Now in its third year, the IndieFest (formally known as the San Francisco Independent Film Festival)[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Reviews
Archival footage, dramatizations, and dark satire capture the dire end-of-century events in the former Yugoslavia Film after film bombards the eye with images of destruction: buildings split open, their wire[…]
Louis Hayward in tights! Edgar Ulmer’s reputation rests largely on a series of no-budget, claustrophobic noirs and thrillers like Strange Illusion, Bluebeard, and of course Detour. But this director was[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
The best jazz documentary just got better Turn a fashion photographer loose on the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, and what do you get? Lots of artsy-fartsy shots of sea,[…]
A beachhouse, no parents, and the fleeting pleasures of “krampach” Coming-of-age dramas are dicey material at best, ever in danger of succumbing to John Hughes-style clichés about bourgeois brats, or[…]
Asian · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
These boys mix it up, sort of, in India’s first gay indie Writer-director Kaizad Gustad’s Bombay Boys (1998) is, of course, not the first Indian film to deal “seriously” with[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
“No actual fucking!” as the author says, but there are plenty of other pleasures in this lurid ’60s rarity whose authorship remains contested. American International Picture’s De Sade (starring Keir[…]
Actors & Personalities · Writers & Critics
“The more he writes about Julia, the madder Tony gets.” One thing the American people do not need in their lives is more stress. They do not need some tea-sipping,[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Horror · Pre-Code · Reviews
The normals are the real freaks in this still gut-wrenching horror classic Production Notes In mid-1931, MGM production head Irving Thalberg summoned scenarist Willis Goldbeck to tell him the time[…]
