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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:
Asian · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Hou on The Assassin: I don’t believe we should blindly obey masters. Nie Yinniang is ordered by her master Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi) to kill a high-ranking official, but – once[…]
Years from now, there will be little question as to his place in film history – a prominent seat at the grownups’ table, with a place card highlighting his run[…]
Crime · LGBT & Queer · Writers & Critics
Someday someone will tease apart the many layers of Damon’s performance: the charming Ripley, the frightened Ripley, the exposed Ripley, his voice subtly betraying him even as face remains serene.[…]
How radically mundane can things get? * * * Doing Nothing, Really Well At her workshops in New York, the renowned screenwriter Yvette Biro asks students to come up with[…]
Editor’s note: We’re posting Erich “Mr. Acidemic” Kuersten’s viewing guide a couple of days before Halloween to give our readers a chance to locate these “cool and strange” suggestions spanning cinema’s[…]
Fabian’s self-destructive peregrination, the ordeal he has imposed on himself through others – from the double murder, to the rape of his sister, to the slaying of his once beloved[…]
Directors · Festivals & Awards
From the start of Blood of My Blood, we can sense the power that is contained within the mysterious malleability of light. Within a scene, some actions are clearly etched[…]
Books · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray
What’s remarkable, in both book and film, is how the metafictional elements do not detract from our emotional investment in the straightforward fiction. Where Fowles’ interjected commentary and authorial intrusions form[…]
“There was a time in movies like The Purple Rose of Cairo when characters left the screen and came down to be incarnated into real life … Today, it would be reality that is transfused into the screen to be disincarnated. Nothing separates them anymore. The osmosis, the telemorphosis is complete.”
A reluctant genre force who admits his pictures start out as regular films but turn into horror movies much the same way he describes the process of filmmaking itself as[…]
The film makes a far more subtle statement about childhood’s inevitable, metaphorical death: All innocent children must eventually grow into corrupted adults, and adults will only suffer for trying to[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Note: Gordon Thomas’s review of the DVD set The Olive Thomas Collection, first published on November 1, 2005, is also a provocative profile of one of Hollywood’s most fascinating early scandals/tragedies. To[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books
She was never classically beautiful, at least by Hollywood’s exaggerated standards: a few too many sharp angles on her face, a few too many vertical inches on her frame. But[…]
It’s more than magic * * * With Rachel Weisz as a fourth-century intellectual surrounded by far from intellectually questing males, Agora was Spain’s most commercially successful film of 2009.[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · War
American Sniper becomes neither a post-ideological assertion of the nobility of the soldier forced to reflect on his own beliefs, nor a latter-day western investigating the presence of violence at[…]
The duplicity of hallucination/sight and transcendence/imprisonment is essential to the meaning: flicker cinema breaks the normal illusion of cinema – movement – replacing it with the audience’s self-consciousness of their[…]
SF & Fantasy · Thrillers & Action
The movie makes a half-hearted attempt at chastising contemporary society and its dependence on technology, on machines (ironically, Sarah would not have survived without the help of a machine). Everyone[…]
From the margins, both a “crazy man” and visionary artists can ask: How can leaders govern when language has been debased and words no longer have true meaning? * *[…]
Directors · Interviews · Visual Artists · Writers & Critics
MIKE LEIGH: People have said to me, “Oh, I’m surprised Turner was like that, I would have thought he would be rather Byronic and beautiful and ascetic and nervously brilliant”[…]
The dominant image from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is that of an opaque pool of black liquid, into which sink a variety of men who have fallen victim[…]
