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June 4, 2026
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The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Producers & Studios · Silents
“With his acting experience and technical know-how, Young Deer soon advanced to one of Pathé’s leading filmmakers. His Indian identity served him well: no one in the cast or crew at that time would have taken orders from a black man.”
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
“They were educated in security, and these guys are raised with the concept that the word ‘Jew’ means ‘enemy.’ They all look at themselves in the mirror, and they imagine themselves to be superheroes, spy killers . . . I doubt they even saw the film before banning it.”
Who needs an Oscar when you can have an Emmy?
“Good bad movies have been around since the dawn of cinema. Logically, they cannot be more common to one era than another. If you’re looking for empty-headed entertainment on a Saturday night, you could pop in an early Chaplin short just as easily as The Cannonball Run (1981), especially once you realize how much they have in common.”
Festivals & Awards · Uncategorized
“At a protest against the demolition of the historic Emek theatre, Nil was beaten and kicked by police offers. My fellow FIPRESCI juror, the excellent critic Berke Göl, was grabbed by the throat, punched, and arrested. Hundreds of other protestors — largely film critics, actors, and directors including festival guest Costa-Gavras — were subject to police force.”
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
The causation of this book’s variable inattentiveness to any coloring detail is the same source of the book’s greater fundamental and overarching flaw. Fifty Shades of Grey just has too much sex in it.
“Django Unchained was the subject of controversy due to its use of racial epithets and depiction of slavery; many reviewers have defended the usage of the language by pointing out the historic context of race and slavery in America. Spike Lee, in an interview with Vibe magazine, said he would not see the film, explaining, ‘All I’m going to say is that it’s disrespectful to my ancestors. That’s just me . . . I’m not speaking on behalf of anybody else.’ Lee later tweeted, ‘American Slavery Was Not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.’ Writing in the Los Angeles Times, journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan noted the difference between Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and Django Unchained: ‘It is an institution whose horrors need no exaggerating, yet Django does exactly that, either to enlighten or entertain. A white director slinging around the n-word in a homage to ’70s blaxploitation à la Jackie Brown is one thing, but the same director turning the savageness of slavery into pulp fiction is quite another.'” — Wikipedia
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
“The queer theorist Leo Bersani has argued for the “self-shattering” qualities of gay sex, but Plata Quemada foregrounds gay desire as a mutually shattering event. The film’s romantic nihilism is at the heart of both its appeal and its essentially troubling nature.”
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
“Indeed, if there is a single distinguishing feature of Beresford’s technique, it is a persistent evenhandedness that refuses to either exalt or vilify. In writing the screenplay for Breaker Morant, he explains, ‘I wasn’t interested in making these men out to be heroes. I wasn’t trying to whitewash the situation. What I was interested in was the moral responsibility in times of war.'”
“The film beautifully captures the slow decomposing of its characters by following a parallel process at the level of cinematic composition.”
Actors & Personalities · Books
Lee Marvin: Point Blank, by Dwayne Epstein. Tucson, AZ: Schaffner Press, 2013. 303pp. Hardcover. $27.95. With his many iconic films, his record of combat action in the Pacific during WW2,[…]
EDITOR’S NOTE: Our innate modesty and abhorrence of insularity, self-referencing, self-reflexivity, and, well, self-everything would normally prohibit us from publishing this piece. But we were so captivated by this tribute[…]
Note: This tribute to Bette Davis appeared previously in online Bright Lights in 1997. “Millions of moviegoers responded to the challenge of her headstrong, neurotic heroines who, like Frankenstein’s monster,[…]
Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles, by Mark Shiel. London: Reaktion, 2012. Hardback: $39.00. 336pp. ISBN: 978-1-86189-902-6 We all think we know Los Angeles. We think we know it because[…]
Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips, by Michael Ankerich. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. Hardcover. $40.00. Not too many remember Mae Murray. Not a one of her[…]
Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2011. Paperback. $45.00 Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study opens with Jean-Luc Godard’s well-traveled maxim that “all you need[…]
The directorial personality of Michael Curtiz remains elusive, but his visual talent is indisputable. Look closely at the lighting and composition of these images from Mystery of the Wax Museum[…]
Hungarian-born filmmaker, Michael Curtiz (pictured with Joan Crawford, above), is considered by many to be one of the quintessential Hollywood directors – he is, after all, the man who[…]
“Director Arnold heightens the once-“natural” processes of life events such as birth and death by setting them outside, historically as if for the last time, before Western medicine and Victorian domesticity.”
