Bright Lights Film Journal

  • TwitterTwitter
  • FacebookFacebook
  • InstagramInstagram
  • Google+Google+
  • RSSRSS
  • About
    • Staff
    • History
    • Contact
    • Advertise with BLFJ
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Banned Words
    • BLFJ News
    • Issue Archive
  • Artists
    • Actors & Personalities
    • Cinematographers
    • Composers
    • Directors
    • Editors
    • Interviews
    • Visual Artists
    • Writers & Critics
  • Movies
    • DVD & Blu-ray
    • Festivals & Awards
    • Lists
    • Reviews
    • Photo Essays
  • Genres
    • Activist & Political
    • Animation
    • Asian
    • Avant Garde & Underground
    • Crime
    • Documentaries
    • Erotica & Exploitation
    • Historical & Epic
    • Horror
    • LGBT & Queer
    • Music & Musicals
    • Noir
    • Pre-Code
    • SF & Fantasy
    • Silents
    • Westerns
  • TV & Streaming
  • Books
  • Contributors
  • Subscribe
  • Ads
    • Most Popular

      All time

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

      49 Comments

    • The Last Airbender: The Most (Incomplete) Fantastic Journey

      30 Comments

    • Latest Stories

      What is new?

    • Desire as a Postcard: Michael Mann’s Cinema and the Postmodern Male Subject

      August 15, 2026

    • Pleasant Valley as Funhouse Mirror: Regional Othering, Racial Displacement, and the Politics of the Hillbilly Icon in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs!

      August 11, 2026

    • Comments

      Most Recent

    • 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)

    • The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:

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

Activist & Political · Asian · Directors · Interviews

0

Challenging the Censor: An Interview with Indian Political Documentarian Rakesh Sharma

  • December 2, 2016

“India has always assigned a special sort of power to film . . . an extraordinary power to corrupt gullible masses has been given to cinema.” – Rakesh Sharma *[…]

Activist & Political · Books · Horror

0

Book Review: Films of the New French Extremity: Visceral Horror and National Identity

  • November 29, 2016

By the mid-2000s, following social unrest and political upheaval in France, and culminating with the emergence of the “torture-porn” horror subgenre in the United States with titles such as Saw[…]

Activist & Political · Crime · Essays

0

Lords of Nothing: Hell or High Water (2016)

  • November 22, 2016

“Hey, buddy. We’re exactly the same. What’s happening to these people happened to my ancestors, and it happened to your ancestors.” – Alberto to Marcus in Hell or High Water,[…]

Directors · Film Technology & History · SF & Fantasy

6

George Lucas’s Wildest Vision: Retrofuturist Auteurism in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)

  • November 15, 2016

The very foundation of Lucas’s cinematic philosophy is newness – this comes through in his obsession with technological possibilities, and through his genuinely childlike pursuit of spectacle and wonder. His[…]

Comedy · Drama

0

The Crazy World of His Girl Friday (1940)

  • November 10, 2016

His Girl Friday’s headlong pace feels like that of modern life, and its rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue calls to mind our modern media babble, with innumerable people around the globe and[…]

African · Experimental & Underground

0

Waiting for Cinema: Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Naked Reality (2016)

  • November 7, 2016

Bekolo’s cinema is not just “African,” or postcolonial, or experimental, or narrative. It is also a cinema that constantly searches for itself, for what it is and what it can accomplish.[…]

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[…]

  • « Previous Page
  • Next Page »
  • Links + BSA

    ProjectorScreen.com
    Shop ProjectorScreen.com for the best projectors and projector screens.
    YouTube to MP3
    Wholesale Home Audio Video
    • Weird Band Names
    • How to write a script for a TV show PDF
    • Marketing Enablement
      • TwitterTwitter
      • FacebookFacebook
      • InstagramInstagram
      • Google+Google+
      • RSSRSS

      © 2020 Bright Lights Film Journal | brightlightsfilm.com
      Online since 1996 | ISSN: 0147-4049
      a Studio Hyperset expression · Design by Irina Beffa · Theme Art by Jim McDermott
      Privacy