All Is Grace: The films of Robert Bresson
Poetry in motion: Bresson resurrected and renewed There aren’t many art forms where commercial success is relentlessly equated with aesthetic worth. In painting, the idea that Walter Keane is a[…]
Dark Truths: Notes on William Friedkin
Presenting the impresario of the deviant demimonde: William Friedkin William Friedkin’s career is a study in contradictions. A liberal intellectual by nature who made two of the most notorious works[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Uncategorized
Sadie Benning’s Pixel Pleasures
What mysterious force lay behind the teenage grrrl’s crudely drawn but strangely evocative masks? Sadie Benning has been a cause celebre in the queer community for almost a decade. Born[…]
Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Two Early Warhols: Screen Test #2 and Restaurant
Ronald Tavel, Mario Montez, and Edie Sedgwick strut their superstardom in these early works by the master of pop kitsch camp For most people, the quintessential “Andy Warhol film” is[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
“Sorry! It Had to Be Done!” Radical Actioner Kurt Kren
Presenting Kurt Kren — humble bank teller by day, radical action naked performance artist by night! The exigencies of living and working miles from the mainstream can prevent even the[…]
Directors · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Paul Morrissey on DVD: Four Camp Classics
Sluts, stoners, and screeching drag queens decorate Morrissey’s curdled campfests Gerri Miller: “You used to be dynamite, Joe. Don’t you miss it?” Joe Dallesandro: “Uh … yeah.” – Trash It’s[…]
Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews · Visual Artists
Love Stories: Pierre et Gilles (1997)
The love in this film about the two lost boys of Eurotrash art is mostly self-love. The art of Pierre and Gilles, affectionately known as P&G, has always been a[…]
Book review: Harvey Keitel, by Marshall Fine
Harvey Keitel: The Art of Darkness. The Unauthorized Biography, by Marshall Fine. New York: Fromm International, 1998. ISBN 0-88064-191-6, Cloth, 272pp, $25.00. Harvey Keitel, as rendered by film critic Marshall[…]
Book review: That’s Enough, Folks, by Henry T. Sampson
That’s Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960, by Henry T. Sampson. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8108-3250-X, Hardcover library binding (no dust jacket), 249pp, $60.00. Scarecrow Press[…]
Book review: The Vampire Gallery by J. Gordon Melton
The Vampire Gallery: A Who’s Who of the Undead, by J. Gordon Melton. Farmington Hills, MI: Visible Ink Press (a division of Gale Research), 1998. ISBN 1-57859-053-1, Trade paper, 500pp, $19.95. J.[…]
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Cultural Makeovers: Tranny Fest 1998
When gender gets in the way, as it so often does, these gender pioneers say “Change it!” Trannies of every stripe — drag queens and kings, transsexuals, intersexuals, etc. —[…]
Frank Capra’s American Dream (Kenneth Bowser, 1997)
This beloved film artist was driven as much by self-doubt as by his belief in the power of the “little man” The rise of Frank Capra from sickly, abused, impoverished[…]
Unmade Beds (Nicholas Barker, 1997)
An arresting look at the limited lives of four New York singles, playing themselves British director Nicholas Barker’s New York cult hit Unmade Beds has an unintended effect that will[…]
Mother and Son (Alexander Sokurov, 1997)
Even the cinematic frame isn’t safe from Sokurov’s grim sleight-of-hand Painterliness in cinema has its pitfalls. Filmmakers like Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman built careers on bringing visual imagery familiar[…]
Bad Manners (Jonathan Kaufer, 1997)
Watch out for that “placid surface.” Movies based on plays don’t always fare well in the transition. There’s a double danger here: slavishly recreating the “stage experience” in its often[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)
The supreme masterpiece of the poetic documentary form Three recent views of Cuba: the repressive, fragmented, poverty-stricken last gasp of modern Communism offered by the U.S. media; the wonderland of[…]
Thanhouser Classics: Long-Lost Pleasures from the Dawn of Cinema
Thanhouser produced 1,000+ titles between 1909 and 1917, but less than 200 survive. Silent cinema is often written off, even by cinephiles who pride themselves on their intimate knowledge of[…]
LGBT & Queer · Reviews · Visual Artists
Devoutly Elusive: Love Is the Devil (John Maybury, 1998)
Timid top George Dyer meets pushy bottom Francis Bacon, with art and death the inevitable result In a typical moment in this artful biopic of Francis Bacon, the ultra-queer painter[…]
Comedy · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
Primal Gross-out: Pink Flamingos Restored
The seminal trash classic all dressed up with somewhere to go Cinema, like any art form, has its milestones — the first “story film” in The Great Train Robbery (1903),[…]
Words and Music: An Unsung Masterpiece?
Forgotten biopic offers a baker’s dozen of delights Is Words and Music, MGM’s 1948 “and then they wrote” biopic of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, a masterpiece? Although long[…]
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