Shifting Sexualities: Bedrooms and Hallways
The Go Fish queen goes fishing again – this time for gay boys and the men and women who love them Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994) was one of the[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
The Day the Bronx Invaded Earth: The Life and Cinema of the Brothers Kuchar
Forget all those other boring indie brother teams – these guys were the original geniuses of cinema’s bargain basement. The sudden death, disappearance, or withdrawal of a key actor during[…]
Chatting about Other Things: An Interview with Federico Fellini
The Master speaks on life, art, and Carlos Castaneda Federico Fellini’s fantasy world, which has become more dreamlike over the years, shows us the spectacle of life. Yet, paradoxically, the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Fred and Ginger Take Off: Flying Down to Rio
“Hey fella, twirl that old propella” Hollywood producer Merriam Cooper loved three things: airplanes, the tropics, and giant gorillas.1 In Flying Down to Rio, Cooper’s 1933 airborne musical, he went[…]
Deadly Crawl: The Velocity of Gary
The “velocity” of this misguided AIDS drama never materializes Director Dan Ireland made an impressive debut in 1997 with The Whole Wide World, a sleeper about the 1930s pulp writer[…]
American Beauty: Why It Sucks and Why the Critics Love It
Okay, American Beauty is shallow, pretentious, smug, condescending, and parochial. It radiates the traditional show-biz contempt for the talent-free slobs who inhabit American small towns and suburbia, cut off from[…]
Unhappy, Critic: Happy, Texas
Mark Illsley’s dicey debut feature about faux gay cons in the hideous heartland One sign of the maturing of a community is its ability to laugh at itself, something that[…]
Draining the Drama: Simon Shore’s Get Real
This mixed-bag British coming out drama doesn’t quite come out. A film with scenes of a trim 16-year-old schoolboy dawdling decoratively outside a public toilet hoping a trick will stroll[…]
All Roads Lead to Love: Tanya Wexler’s Finding North
A good-natured low-budget road movie with a queer twist With occasional exceptions like Philadelphia, the “AIDS movie” has been mostly a ghetto genre, so much so that many of these[…]
Beatnik Chic: Chuck Workman’s The Source
An uneven new documentary looks at all things Beat. The Beats have returned with a vengeance. New editions of On the Road are rolling off the presses; interest in Allen[…]
Tragic Poignancy: Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Loyal 47 Ronin
The great director’s legendary version of Chushingura is finally available in a sparkling DVD transfer Genroku Chushingura, also known as The Forty-Seven Ronin of the Genroku Era, or in the[…]
Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin’s Little Fugitive Escapes to DVD
A breakthrough indie and a crash course in no-budget film production Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin’s groundbreaking 1953 indie, Little Fugitive (reviewed more extensively elsewhere in Bright Lights, along with[…]
Antonioni’s Red Desert
The Italian maestro’s stroll through the modern wasteland Red Desert occupies a curious place in Antonioni’s canon. Made in 1964 as a French-Italian coproduction, it’s wedged between the international success[…]
Mario Bava’s Baron Blood on DVD
This middle-range Bava looks better than ever on DVD Baron Blood (original title Orrori del castello di Norimberga, Gli) is often written off as middle-range Bava at best, and with[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Radley Metzger: The Dirty Girls, Carmen Baby, The Princess and the Call Girl on DVD
Will Metzger mania never end? Image Entertainment’s ambitious program of releasing what appears to be just about every Radley Metzger film is a feast for completists and fans of the[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Maverick Metzger: Dark Odyssey and Little Mother
Radley Metzger’s first film and his veiled biopic of saintly slut Evita now on DVD. Radley Metzger’s fame rests largely on having brought sophistication to softcore porn in films like[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Poets of Everyday Life: Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin
Three pioneering American neorealist indies: Little Fugitive, Weddings and Babies, Lovers and Lollipops “The concept of making the film almost unnoticed among crowds seemed to be working.” – Morris Engel, on[…]
Lonesome Leni: The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl
Hitler’s hired hand and master filmmaker Riefenstahl is indeed both wonderful and horrible in Ray Muller’s 1993 documentary. Ray Müller’s monumental (3 hours-plus) The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl[…]
Music & Musicals · Pre-Code · Reviews
Pre-Code Follies: Murder at the Vanities
This 1934 musical mystery has girls, grins, guns, and Duke Ellington, too “Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world.” That was the legend above the entrance[…]
Forgotten and Fantastic: The King of Jazz
Hot licks and high kicks in a rare early musical The King of Jazz is a time machine. This 1929 musical, filmed in Technicolor, preserves a part of America’s musical[…]
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