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Reed manages to reduce a sprawling, complex story into an engaging, if tentacled, 98-minute political thriller, focusing on Montana’s fight against dark money at the US Supreme Court, in the[…]
Film Technology & History · Historical & Epic
Through its complex use of multiple depth planes, deep-focus compositions, close proximity with on-screen texture, Pompeii crafts a vision of an ancient culture that can be described as hyper-haptic; in[…]
Comedy · Directors · Women in Film
American Audiences watched Irma la Douce without discomfort, perhaps because French prostitutes and pimps were performing immoral acts and misdeeds. The same subversion of middle-class values that would later inform[…]
Animation · Asian · Essays · Westerns
What about Zhao’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me avoids the drive-by romanticism of a foreign community that bedevils Anderson’s Isle of Dogs? What makes this a richer portrayal of cultural[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Jurassic Park, in all its dark consumeristic negatives and heartless colonial instincts, exists in the real world as a film in the same way that the park exists in the[…]
Documentaries · Philosophy · TV & Streaming
The film’s childhood-centric poignancy is underscored by the depravity of today’s kindergarteners having to be concerned more with the logistics of hardened desks or evacuation drills thanks in part to[…]
Nearly fifty years after its release, it’s clear Midnight Cowboy pulled off a neat trick. Its story of a naïve “Texas longhorn bull” hustler and a low-rent con man is[…]
Essays · French Cinema · Romance
What will become of Camilla? A character who is unsupported by theatrical context must cease to exist; when the curtain falls, the characters are unleashed from aesthetic dimensions. Renoir makes[…]
Essays · Historical & Epic · War
. . . or how the first surf films helped American men get over the war and change their act * * * In the 1950s and early ’60s, a[…]
Michael Clayton is a character who gets a wake-up call. It’s not an “oh, wow, they killed off that character” moment, it’s not a clever reveal, it’s not an “instant[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · War
The Third Man ends with rejection, physical and emotional death, a descent into a sewer, a walk through a graveyard and cold silence. The ruins of Vienna come to symbolize[…]
“Hayao Miyazaki gets zero marks as a father but full marks as a director of animated films.” – Goro Miyazaki1 * * * Most artists exist under what the literary[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
A Transformers film has to face incessant criticism about the amount of action, the blurry continuity of its symphonies of shrapnel, the overuse of MacGuffins, and the lack of good[…]
Dancer in the Dark is largely about movies, in particular, about those movies in which people sing and dance their troubles away. Even this self-reflexivity situates the film in the[…]
Asian · Interviews · Producers & Studios · Production History
What Third Window’s practices and Adam Torel’s insights provide is a view of the industry that contrasts significantly from current Japanese film research, especially in light of other exhibitors and[…]
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
Mason was “equally at home playing small, brooding anti-heroes, camping it up in a toga, or doing a nice line in late career self-parody.”
MY CHUM, JANE LILEE, Being as it’s coming up on the anniversary of our meeting, I thought I’d check in with you, and maybe get points for remembering the occasion.[…]
This article first appeared in Bright Lights in October 2000. We reprint it as a tribute to the seminal composer on what would have been his 130th birthday. (And frankly, we’re surprised[…]
Fashion · LGBT & Queer · TV & Streaming
Queer Eye strips queerness of radical intention and repackages it as the non-threatening support system of heteronormative practice, with the Fab Five offered up as the ultimate Gay Best Friend[…]
The high-tech and the primitive coexist in The Life Aquatic, much as they do in Keaton’s The Navigator, and as in all of Anderson’s films they combine with the deeply[…]
Comedy · Drama · Festivals & Awards
To Dust (dir. Shawn Snyder) “Isn’t that sweet,” I thought when I picked up my mother’s dropped pocket calendar. So many dates had names on them. Mom doesn’t want to[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
“I’m grateful I didn’t grow up with Barbie.” – Gloria Steinem * * * Gloria Steinem isn’t alone. Lisa Simpson hates Barbie. Feminist writer Roxanne Gay wishes Barbie had never[…]
