For Colored Girls: An Experiment in Melodrama
Always eager to present serious issues, Tyler Perry found a batch in Ntozake Shange’s play For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Before entering filmmaking, Perry[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
Werner Herzog & Errol Morris Headline DOC NYC Fest at IFC Center
DOC NYC, a new documentary festival that runs from November 3-9, features more than 40 films, U.S. premieres, tributes, and appearances, among them both Errol Morris and Werner Herzog. Films[…]
I’m Not There: The 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival
“The Killer Inside Me recalls the novel and film of American Psycho, in which a handsome killer unleashes three-dimensional violence on an otherwise banal society.” Puzzling, singular, and downright whacked, Francis Ford[…]
Comedy · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Between a Rock and a Soft Place: Queering/Queered Heterosexuality in “Career Girl” Films of the 1950s and ’60s
“Perhaps Hollywood, in trying to engage in queer possibilities for its narratives and with its audiences, could only put up a resistance to the binaries in the dominant culture through[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Looking at Charlie – Monsieur Verdoux: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“What’s all this about good and evil?” With the release of The Great Dictator late in 1940, Charlie Chaplin had done it again. He had made a movie that, with[…]
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Film Technology & History · Movie Theatres
Haunted Cinema: Movie Theatres of the Dead
“There are no start times, there are no intermissions . . . there is no beginning, there is no end.” The movie exhibition business has always been extremely volatile. The[…]
Terms of Psychic Warfare: Brian De Palma’s Divided House
“What makes The Fury work in the end is the complementary sense that this conflict is part of the film’s very construction, so you can appreciate the audacity of the auto-da-fé.”
Movie Love: The First TCM Classic Film Festival
“Standing in line ahead of someone was enough to start such a friendship.”
Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
Memos from a Chinese Laundry: Reading Josef von Sternberg
“I would very much like to attract others into my world, but my world is not the world of crowds, though the crowds have often lined up before my world.”1
Marxism Goes to the Movies: On Pioneering Activist Film Critic Harry Alan Potamkin
“He’s keenly sensitive to the immense possibilities of film as not merely an aesthetic medium, but given its mass influence, a social one as well.”
Heavy Hitter in a Delicate Balance: The 48th New York Film Festival
Despite concessions to commerce, much to admire
Activist & Political · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
Living the New High Life: A Current Note on Race and Class in America
Or Can Tea Party Porn Strike a Blow for the American Way?
Actors & Personalities · Essays
Short Takes: Acting: James Dean’s Clumsy Punch
“The time-and-place for Dean’s performances is always now, in the moment of its creation, and he resists any technique that obscures that fact.”
Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Catching It All in Stride: An Interview with Ariel and Nev Schulman on Catfish
“We just followed the leads.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Chasing Windmills: Talking with Juan Luis Bunuel about Welles and Don Quixote
“I’d love to be Orson’s assistant again.”
Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
It Would Make John Waters Proud, But Shakespeare? Musical Spectacle and the Missing Bard in Hamlet 2
“Coogan’s representation of Jesus, ascending high above the audience, is far removed from the silly, sexy Jesus who sang to us earlier wearing a wife-beater.”
Selling Yourself: Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop
“When Banksy sits in silhouette during his onscreen interviews, we have no proof that it’s really him, nor even that Banksy is a real individual.”
Draining Dracula: What’s Missing from Coppola’s Version?
Actually, a lot
A Dog Day’s Night in Brooklyn: Revisiting Lumet, Pacino, and the ’70s in 2010
“My first exposure to the transcendent grit of Dog Day Afternooon, at the age of 13, may have aroused an inchoate urban longing.”
Links + BSA
