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September 5, 2026
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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:
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[…]
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;[…]
