Bright Lights Film Journal

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    • Black Lives Matter: Whitewashing the Amanda Knox Story in the Netflix Documentary

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    • Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:

      A Film Divided Against Itself: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)

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      Books: Best Actress: The History of Oscar-Winning Women by Stephen Tapert

Kékszakállú

Experimental & Underground · Festivals & Awards

0

Making Waves: Wavelengths at the Toronto International Film Festival (September 8-18, 2016)

  • November 4, 2016

With so many films being made – many of which will never receive wide distribution – how do you navigate the glut of movies at a whopper like Toronto? *[…]

Essays · Horror · Religion & Spirituality

2

You Say You Want a Revolution? Regan’s Head and The Exorcist

  • October 31, 2016

If the evil spirit is “seen,” that is, reflected . . . he is overcome. – Marie-Louise von Franz Unmask Satan, and you vanquish him. – St. Augustine * *[…]

Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Essays

1

Mapping the (Cinematic) Genome: Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959); Peppermint Candy (1999); Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014)

  • October 24, 2016

Our cinematic genome, meanwhile, is becoming – if not always more clearly defined – certainly more rich and diverse and, at the same time, more universal than ever. * *[…]

Directors · Drama · Essays

1

The Propagation of Empathy, the Absence of Bathos: On Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004)

  • October 19, 2016

Regret is perhaps Payne’s greatest theme. The continual human dramedy, the elegiac comedy, a country full of people with limited potential raised to think everyone is special, confined souls struggling[…]

Reviews

3

Mia of the Spirits: Woody Allen’s Alice (1990)

  • October 15, 2016

Alice isn’t all high-concept reverie and mystical melancholy. After a series of self-consciously arthouse films and sombre homages – and bookended between Another Woman and Crimes and Misdemeanours on the[…]

Directors · War

1

A Legacy of Hope: Andrzej Wajda, 1926-2016

  • October 12, 2016

He studied and documented his country’s history, politics, and national myths in both film and theater, and was a beloved mentor to countless young filmmakers.  * * * Andrzej Wajda[…]

Price Carson in Mortuary. Photo courtesy Echo Bridge/Photofest

Directors · Horror

5

Experimenting with the Horrific: A Reappraisal and Retrospective of the Films of Tobe Hooper

  • October 6, 2016

Hooper’s interest in horror articulates itself primarily in formal invention: how can the frame be used to incapacitate viewer expectations? * * * Tobe Hooper’s most recent feature film, Djinn[…]

Amanda Knox. Screenshot from the documentary

African American · Crime · Documentaries

49

Black Lives Matter: Whitewashing the Amanda Knox Story in the Netflix Documentary

  • September 30, 2016

By ignoring the black lives involved, the new Netflix documentary Amanda Knox (premiering on Netflix on September 30) is not only a very white film, it ends up producing its own miscarriage of[…]

Elle Fanning, The Neon Demon

Festivals & Awards

0

Blood’s Up: The 2016 Melbourne International Film Festival

  • September 25, 2016

But even though Jesse (Elle Fanning) is “everything” right now, what she has is fragile: the aura of enchantment so prized by fashion is easily lost. Once she stops looking[…]

Drama · Essays

1

The Trouble with Scottie (on Vertigo)

  • September 19, 2016

I have yet to encounter anybody who feels my fierce outrage at Scottie’s unfairness toward the necklace. That object is all-important, not because it is the vital clue to the Madeleine-is-Judy[…]

Isn't Life Wonderful

Comedy · Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents

0

Two from Flicker Alley: Isn’t Life Wonderful (Griffith, 1924) and Chaplin’s Essanay Comedies, 1915-16

  • September 15, 2016

From his very beginnings as a filmmaker, Griffith understood the efficacy of location shooting. Putting actors into real landscapes and streets not only went to authenticating the narrative but had[…]

Jesse Eisenberg as Bobby

Comedy · Directors

1

On Café Society and Woody Allen – Last seen in search of lost innocence, and rich wood paneling!

  • September 11, 2016

Art doesn’t have to be autobiographical, does it? Woody can write about the kid he wasn’t as well as the kid he was, can’t he? * * * I haven’t[…]

Stephen Lang and Dylan Minnette

Crime · Horror

1

Don’t Breathe, Just Keep on Surviving

  • September 8, 2016

What I have identified is a recurrent depiction of American citizens committing acts of extreme violence against one another, almost always in service of financial interest. * * * Watched[…]

Doom-Head (Richard Brake) is not here to elicit your amusement

Horror

2

The Horror of a Nation’s Despair: Rob Zombie’s 31 (2016)

  • September 4, 2016

Much like the serial-killer-themed amusement park ride in House of 1000 Corpses, 31 is a fast and hyper-sensory excursion into a nation’s sickest and bleakest fixations. * * * Rob[…]

SF & Fantasy

30

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith: George Lucas’s Greatest Artistic Statement?

  • August 28, 2016

Never one to divide “high” art from “low,” Lucas draws from every available well of visual representation to craft this uniquely digital genre entertainment, a film that is broadly drawn[…]

Nanni Moretti and Margherita Buy

Directors · Drama · Interviews

1

“What Remains When You Die”: Nanni Moretti Talks About My Mother (Mia Madre) (2015)

  • August 26, 2016

Editor’s note: This is the second director interview by our correspondent Amir Ganjavie, this one conducted at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival. The film discussed, My Mother, is being released in the U.S.[…]

The Happening

Directors · Horror

1

M. Night Shyamalan’s Terror Trilogy: Signs (2002), The Village (2004), and The Happening (2008)

  • August 22, 2016

Shyamalan’s three films portray an imbalanced and endangered world; they engage to varying degrees with the imagery and anxiety surrounding terrorist attacks in the wake of September 11, 2001, while[…]

Ingrid Bergman, Michael Chekhov, and Gregory Peck in Spellbound

Drama · Essays

1

Any Husband of Yours: Spellbound and 13 Minutes

  • August 15, 2016

Dreams and Pistol Shots  * * * From Leslie Halliwell to David Thomson, capsule reviews of Hitchcock’s Spellbound have made sure we know that the psychiatry on offer is pure[…]

The Purge: Election Year. Photo courtesy of Universal Studios.

Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy

1

Blood Will Tell: The Purge: Election Year (2016)

  • August 6, 2016

To be a popular film, which is the intent of the Purge series, is to play into what an audience loves; and in the case of something it is not[…]

Actors & Personalities

0

Happy Birthday to Cinema’s Great Bad Boy: Peter O’Toole (8/2/32-12/14-13)

  • August 2, 2016

“Arriving in Los Angeles for the film’s premiere there, he quickly blotted his copybook by hurling a drink at the producer Sam Spiegel, the most powerful man in Hollywood at the time. Spiegel had ‘massacred’ Lawrence, O’Toole remarked, by cutting twenty minutes of it in order ‘to sell more fucking ice cream to the punters.'”

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