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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:
“When Ellen Sands, the land girl who vies for his affections, sees Johnny off, the implication is that she’ll be a soft place for him to land when he comes down from his guilty obsession over Mora; her offer of coffee on his way out is as Ariadne’s gift to Theseus of the thread of consciousness that would lead him out of the minotaur maze.”
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
“This noir heroine comes very close to having it all: the house, the money, and the freedom. Kitty Collins, Kathie Moffatt, and the rest of the femme fatales would have been exultant. They’d have tried to knock some sense into Diane, told her not to mope about and enjoy the jackpot. But she is something of an angel. She repents.”
“Dwan was never afraid of melodrama, so often disdained for its contrivance, implausibility and heightened emotion; nor of farce, with its tendency to reduce characters to spastic puppets or wind-up toys. Dwan’s skill at visually expressing relationships — the legacy of his nearly two decades making silent movies — cannot by itself salvage stories or characters that fail that test of engaging us; but when combined with his crisp narrative intelligence and detached yet compassionate eye for human behavior, it gives his best films an apparently effortless power to engross.”
…exposing the real end game fantasia of materialism as nothing less than bribing your way out of the moment.
You might think that everyone knows the Beatles. But you would be wrong. When a couple of weeks ago I asked the clerk at Best Buy if they had the[…]
“when asked by his rival/buddy about the eight years of hell he endured over some back room beers, Devane says merely, “you learn to love it.” “
“Matheson was able to get right to the heart of the matter, to expose the raw nerve at the base of our collective paranoia and atomic anxiety, to realize all inner demons were projections outward, and vice versa…”
If film noir is defined by any single image, it is the dark city. Yet a film doesn’t have to take place in the dark city to be noir. Any fallen world[…]
The first review I wrote for Bright Lights was of Eddie Cantor’s Whoopee! (I left off the exclamation point) in the early days of the web (May 1998). This 1930 Sam[…]
A film noir doesn’t have to have an unhappy ending … but it helps. Here are 10 film noir endings that pack an emotional wallop. I Am a Fugitive from[…]
We don’t want to see dead people, but we damn sure want them to see us.
Vincente Minnelli’s reputation is that of a stylist – someone who did not author his own screenplays, but who directed whatever the studio (usually MGM) assigned to him (usually musicals), and[…]
(this is a) breakthrough in the way media is delivered, solidifying the idea that the voice of the fans can revive just about anything, and introducing the full season ‘back-to-back’ marathon as the new ideal form of immersive simulacratic experience.
After having seen the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby directed by Elliot Nugent and the 1974 version directed by Jack Clayton, I concluded that the novel was unfilmable. After[…]
The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, by Glenn Frankel. New York: Bloomsbury, USA. 416pp. Hardcover. $28.00. The scene is a rough wooden fort on an East Texas homestead.[…]
A singular and highly accomplished independent film, Upstream Color is philosophical science fiction in the tradition of the French nouvelle vague, seasoned with a dash of Cronenbergian body horror. Like[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries
Originally published in An environmental idealist stops an illegal oil and gas auction by bidding for parcels he can’t possibly afford. Savaged by an exponentially accelerating climate crisis, a once-proud[…]
Obscure Hollywood gems, from the depths of the TCM May 2013 schedule for your DVD-R-ing pleasure
