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[…]
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.”
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