A Little Something for Everyone: Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan
“I never see you lose yourself.”
Essays · Horror · Writers & Critics
The Cinematic Islands of Dr. Moreau: Beasts, Monsters, and Mad Scientists
“There are monsters that are born with a form that is half-animal and half-human . . . which are produced by sodomists and atheists who join together, and break out[…]
Opera Rules
Warsaw/Chicago Film Diary 1. Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky The perils of virginity, or I Was a Teenage Were-Swan. Black Swan is a hot mess: preposterous if you listen to the[…]
Erich Kuersten’s Top Ten of 2010
2010, the year movies crept off the screen and into the floorboards, the handhelds, the flats and the 3-Ds. Counting down to doomsday 2012, I hope more films like THE BLACK SWAN and ENTER THE VOID come our way.
R.I.P. Jill Haworth (1945-2011)
Otto Preminger had a thing for saintly blondes. The best known of Preminger’s saintly – and hauntingly beautiful – blondes was Jean Seberg whom Preminger discovered and cast as the lead in[…]
WINTER’S BONE and the Rural Noir
Although most film noirs take place in an urban setting, the “dark city,” Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) shows how the noir vision can thrive almost anywhere – it is[…]
Book Review: From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond: Images of India in International Films of the 20th Century, by Vijaya Mulay
Like the majority of people who have never been to India, most of my knowledge of the country has come from some books but mostly from films. When I was[…]
Of Gods and Men
Des Hommes et des Dieux, dir. Xavier Beauvois On the night of March 26, 1996, seven Trappist monks were abducted from the Monastery of Tibhirine in Algeria by members of[…]
HELLO OUT THERE – The Last Testament of James Whale
Hello Out There (1949), like virtually all of the films James Whale directed after Show Boat, had a troubled production history. It never obtained a commercial release. Yet, unlike any[…]
DVD REVIEW: The Nightmare Emerges: Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos (Criterion Collection)
by MATTHEW SORRENTO Guillermo del Toro has discussed how his childhood helped mold his imagination – being raised in a stern Roman Catholic family only fueled his dark fantasies. His[…]
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books
Book Review: Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century
Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger’s big fruitcake of a book, Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century from HarperCollins, is hard to take too seriously.[…]
Revisiting DUNE (1984) with Sean Young
Consider the following plotline: A young man travels to another world where he infiltrates the indigenous people and adopts their ways. He is befriended by a beautiful young woman who[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books
Book Review: Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America
Peter Biskind’s plump new book about the life, loves and career of Warren Beatty, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (Simon & Schuster, 2010, 627 pgs., $30.00) has come up[…]
Review: Czech Reparation and Reconciliation in Kawasaki’s Rose
by Matthew Sorrento Films often speculate about how we’d react should a partner we thought dead (or approaching death) suddenly reappear. In Cast Away, Tom Hanks’ character returns home to[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Loving the Bad: An Interview with Frankie Latina and Sasha Grey on Modus Operandi
by Matthew Sorrento If intentional camp is bad, then camp striving to be bad is even worse. So claimed Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” and others[…]
That’s My Girl! Well, actually, she’s not. But we love each other anyway.
What do Bellissima (Visconti, 1951) and The Unknown Woman/La Sconsciuta (Zamarion/ Tornatore, 2006) have in common? Apart from being examples of Italian Cinema randomly connected by my recent viewing, the answer is they[…]
John Cassavetes as Machine Gun McCain (1969)
Film scholar David Bordwell describes – dismisses? – crime films as venues for showy roles, opportunities for actors to break away from their comfort zones and find their bad selves.[…]
Cannibals All!
Warsaw Film Festival Highlights (plus a few stray thoughts) 1) We Are What We Are – dir. Jorge Michel Grau, Mexico The set-up could come out of an old neorealist[…]
Strange Correspondences: “The Last Man on Earth” and “L’eclisse”
How odd to see Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth (Sidney Salkow 1964) wandering alienated through the same virtually deserted suburban neighborhood of Rome through which an alienated[…]
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