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June 4, 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:
Nothing about Downton Abbey in this article By the end of season four of Breaking Bad, chem teacher gone wild Walter White (Bryan Cranston) had killed just about everyone worth[…]
“Praise the Lord and pass the absinthe!” When Marion Davies first met William Randolph Hearst, she was a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, and a showgirl she remained. She had an uncertain[…]
Samantha’s voice may have a loving tenor, but the words themselves are mournful, and it’s easy to see why. So long as the two remain together, Theodore cannot live to[…]
“We’ve consumed the romanticism of the artist, and now we’re busily consuming the history of that consumption.” It’s an accomplishment to produce a period piece whose authenticity comes through the[…]
“The first time I saw him – in his grungy sweats, slouching around the dim, indoor, eleven-laps-to-the mile track – he already had the snarky, shambling look that would become[…]
Annie Hall is warm, taut rather than loose, angular instead of fuzzy, Manhattan is a love letter to New York, a hymn to neurosis, and a delicate straddling of the[…]
“With Ophuls too we need to be on our guard, given the idiosyncratic way he shapes material. There is often a tricky leakage of voice-over between successive scenes: at one[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
“People believe what they want to believe because the guy who made this was so good that it’s real to everybody. Now who’s the master, the painter or the forger?”[…]
“I now present Anthony Quinn (1915-2001) – the mighty one himself – in a light few will recognize: not Quinn the rank sentimentalist ham (or Eskimo), but Quinn the deeply[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
INTRODUCTION Jack Pickford – actor, director, and alleged womaniser, alcoholic, drug-user, bootlegger and all-around scoundrel. Born in 1896, Jack was the brother of Mary Pickford, the Queen of Hollywood during[…]
“Even if Schrader would like to completely eliminate any ‘magic’ or dream-into-reality bleeding, it’s still there – the boundaries of his material threaten to swamp him at every turn, so kudos to him for at least not running in fear back behind the phallic bars of patriarchal condescension that was such an annoyance in the original. “
“In the 1930s, Warners effectively became the studio to go to for social critique, a risky position to hold under the Hays Code when pictures could be censored not just[…]
Activist & Political · SF & Fantasy
Avatar metaphorically attacks all martial, colonial, and expansionist histories, which have occurred at the expense of the world’s indigenous peoples and Earth’s biocomplexity. Both implicitly, through the film’s narrative, and[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
“To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla” ~ Marco Ferreri Francis Bacon once said: “We’re flesh, potential carcasses. If[…]
In Jarhead, his memoir of the first Iraq War, Tony Swofford calls our attention to a paradox of “antiwar” films. When he and his fellow Marines hear they’re about to[…]
“No-one can get over the paradox of a sphinx head on top of a chic model’s body: the sense of this slight figure propping up a magnificent mask.” Cinemania has[…]
Experimental & Underground · TV & Streaming
Based on a pair of TV movie adaptations by Richard Matheson, the Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974) series ran only 20 episodes, surprising given the popular and commercial success of[…]
Cinema has a way of capturing the unease of life, those wearying sharp fragments and provocations of everyday experience that reveal a greater truth. At the 54th Thessaloniki International Film[…]
“Pornographic,” “voyeuristic,” “clinical” . . . at a time when gay cinema is known for its matter-of-fact, graphic handling of sex, it’s surprising that the sex scenes in Abdellatif Kechiche’s[…]
“Rather than some good safe white elephant of a film or a smutty feel-bad historical repressionist masterpiece, these are films that have escaped the maze of cliché with moxy, wit, and nutz.”
