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September 8, 2026
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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:
The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:
This brilliant Brit’s sleight-of-hand breathes life into wood and wire At a symposium on puppet animation in Seattle a few years ago, Barry Purves, an alumnus of the Aardman Studios[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
This golden age is more like fool’s gold, but it has its thrills Even as a Brit, when I think of exploitation cinema, I tend to think of Roger Corman,[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Reviews
Celebrating activism and exposing some of the more chaotic corners of world politics Despite an avalanche of news and quasi-news programs, tabloid yakfests, and crudities like Cops, Survivor, and the[…]
Asian · Directors · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Resurrection and renewal in postwar Japanese cinema, as seen through Tomu’s 1955 masterpiece Following Japan’s surrender in World War II, the colonial tables were turned. The Chinese took control of[…]
All’s quiet on the cinematic front in this seductive survey of the artful ’20s Superman had his Fortress of Solitude; San Francisco has its Silent Film Festival. This annual event,[…]
Gangbangers, sex robots, and babydykes, oh my! Now in its 19th year, the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) has become an increasingly plush and rather important venue for[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
A bumper crop of docs scale the heights and trawl the depths of queer culture “There was nothing to come out to. We never heard the word homosexual. The media[…]
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[…]
