Film Noir, Bête Blanche: Blood on the Snow in Fargo
The horror in this film is not the noir violence that it brings to the bucolic Midwestern setting, but the inability of that violence to leave a mark – the[…]
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The horror in this film is not the noir violence that it brings to the bucolic Midwestern setting, but the inability of that violence to leave a mark – the[…]
In the corporate world the film depicts, the lower-level executives are small-time Lotharios who seek no more than sex from female underlings. Their boss, however, battens on the love he[…]
Comedy · Crime · Drugs · LGBT & Queer · New Media
The Scary of Sixty-First expands the umbrella of “buzzword cinema” — it’s a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy with a lesbian sex scene by a popular podcaster and it-girl of the edgy[…]
African American · Literature and Film · Women in Film
The staying power of Passing in 2021 goes far beyond its ripped-from-the-headlines resonances, however. Larsen’s story endures, on the one hand, for its intricate depiction of female friendship, rivalry, and[…]
Essays · Pandemic · SF & Fantasy · War
Excerpted from the author’s new critical study, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades (Oxford University Press, December 2021), with the kind permission of[…]
Directors · Drama · Outsiders · War · Writers & Critics
Rumanian refugee Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) conning a guileless California schoolteacher, Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland, in an Oscar-nominated role), into marrying him so he can enter the United States[…]
Crime · Drama · Production History
“Dedicated to Charlie Bluhdorn who inspired it.” * * * Not only is Mario Puzo’s The Godfather the stuff of Hollywood legend, but so is its turbulent production. Even after[…]
Counterculture · Directors · Drama · Interviews · Restorations
Dennis wasn’t originally hired to direct Out of the Blue, rather he was hired to act in it. After about a week of shooting, the production manager, Paul Lewis, who[…]
Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · German Cinema
Its release on Blu-ray is in some ways a belated victory for the film, whose unsuccessful release in the United States eighty-five years ago was a disappointment to Trenker and[…]
African American · Drama · Melodrama · Reviews · Women in Film
This article appeared first in our all-Sirk print issue (#6, Winter 1977) and was reposted in the March 1997 online version of Bright Lights. We present it here to celebrate[…]
What I want to lose here is any suggestion that there’s only one solution to the problem of getting through tough times together. * * * Three Billboards outside Ebbing[…]
French Cinema · Literature and Film · Philosophy · Writers & Critics
Tout le film est en effet l’histoire d’une persuasion. (The whole film is the story of a persuasion.) – Alain Robbe-Grillet1 En fait, je pense qu’on a tout à fait[…]
African American · Animation · Franchises & Series · Sports
The implication is that fun is what is ultimately being played for – that fun is freedom’s goal, the reason that liberty is desirable at all. Michael knows that if[…]
Books · Experimental & Underground · Philosophy
It is, ostensibly, a story about a truck. The 32-ton Saviem truck of Marguerite Duras’ 1977 experimental film Le Camion moves relentlessly forward, steered by a faceless driver, to an[…]
Documentaries · Film Technology & History · Videos
Herein lies the greater paradox. The attributes that underpinned Blockbuster’s success, and undermined those of others, enabled the creative awakenings of countless people. The Last Blockbuster’s interviewees comment on special[…]
Drama · Essays · Religion & Spirituality
Dare to step together into an “usness” that has no guarantees but the shared vision of belonging, whose embers you agree to slowly tend. History provides the furnishings that are[…]
Drama · Essays · Literature and Film · Westerns
We must dissect why Hud succeeded with reviewers and audiences alike, but to differing effects. The task at hand is not merely to provide a clear analysis of the issues[…]
Books · Directors · Women in Film
Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). The Coppola who emerges from Rogers’s study is therefore something of a double agent. On[…]
African American · Documentaries · Place
The film could be described as “meditative,” but with an important twist: while the directors and Lashay guide the audience through a thoughtful and introspective process – making sense of[…]
Essays · Feminism · Women in Film · Work and Workplace
Sarah is a good astronaut because she is a mother, not in spite of it. And she is a good mother because she is a good astronaut. If Sarah were[…]