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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:
The House of Mystery (Volkoff, 1921-23), Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Restored Works (Vertov, 1924-1934), Joan the Woman (DeMille, 1916), and The Marriage Circle (Lubitsch,[…]
Once a film gives up on originality, it immediately descends into nihilism. Whatever sensory pleasures such a film may offer, the underlying assumption is that the entire experience is empty[…]
Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
Lincoln (2012) & Wolf Hall (2015)/Les Miserables (1933) & Great Expectations (1946/2012) * * * So, notwithstanding humanist art or realistic biography, we go on hurting each other. “Everybody hurts,” as[…]
“It’s really a nightmarish Mother Goose story.”1 – Charles Laughton, director Given the above description, any initial box office success for The Night of the Hunter (1955) was likely to[…]
When the technology of transmitting typed words or smartphone photos and GoPro filming accompanies our every movement and all this runs far ahead of thought, a culture leaves behind both[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Essays · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
He was the spectator at his own drama, like a person at a play he doesn’t understand. – Victor Hugo1 “On the other hand, I don’t want to do Petronius[…]
I will focus on films that contain both of the following markers: (1) an American character exhibits daring but reckless behavior, which triggers continuing, gory disaster for a multinational group;[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
“It’s time to give her story a better ending,” says Jane Anderson in her documentary Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson, speaking of her great[…]
In a dehumanised world it is therefore the replicants who are keener to live, love, and be free. This is another important issue that the film raises: who is actually[…]
Books · Directors · Interviews · Writers & Critics
I could begin to see how the movie was art imitating life and then morphed into life imitating art, with such a palpable sense of the greatest director who ever lived[…]
So even if you aren’t nostalgic for the heady sense of danger and decadence, do yourself a favor and crash the pod down into Carpenter country – an alternate reality[…]
Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Once out of[…]
Mesmerizing designs pull our eyes away from the tiresome demands of history, but Bonello doesn’t portray Yves as an escapist. Instead, he suggests that we cannot assume a straightforward relation[…]
Fortunately for those of us who like distinct and finite categories, the number of plot genres is limited in this formulation by the narrow scope of human desires: find love,[…]
Directors · Interviews · Middle East
I have made films both in Iran and France, so I know the conditions. In France, when funding is given, there are no strings attached to it. You are free[…]
What’s in the bag is Marcello Clerici, and the bag, not surprisingly, is empty. * * * Upon its release in 1970, how many of us were prepared for The[…]
Historical & Epic · Producers & Studios · War
Introduction Hell’s Angels, Howard Hughes’s 1930 film, was praised for its aerial photography and derided for its story. “War Brings Out What People Really Are” surveys critical films Hollywood produced[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Interviews
Hope is the title, half ironic, half resolutely sincere, of a stunning film about African migrants trekking across a continent’s most forbidding landscapes to reach the promised land of Europe.[…]
Every failure, every road not taken is a Gone Girl all its own, Regular Amy’s story a machine for the draining away of these idealizations till she and we are[…]
Suddenly the whole medium grew up before my eyes . . . a grown-up film, with people behaving as they do in real life . . . . Nobody had ever[…]
