Nicole Kidman slumbers next to a symbol of her husband’s infidelity in Eyes Wide Shut Chris Forrester discusses Stanley Kubrick’s final film and how its yuletide setting deepens its interrogations of sexuality, masculinity, and marriage. Of all the great cinephile debates (what is and isn’t a masterpiece, who are the great filmmakers, which Godfather movie… Read more »
In this primer for this fall’s Sirens and Spitfires: Liberated Ladies of Pre-Code Cinema series, co-curator Michaela Owens explains why you shouldn’t sleep on this fierce line-up. What does pre-Code mean? To keep it brief, in the 1920s, Hollywood had so many scandals that, to avoid repercussions from political and religious groups, the major movie… Read more »
“So, Von Sternberg’s movies had to have plots even though they already had them inherent in the images. What he did was make movies naturally — he lived in a visual world. The explanation plots he made up out of some logic having nothing to do with the visuals of his films. His expression was… Read more »
Guest post by Chris Forrester. “It doesn’t suck,” offers a character at one point in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls — a tease, or understatement in one way or another, from a film not uncommonly heralded as the worst of all time. In context, it’s a throwaway line of dialogue from the film’s doe-eyed, sharp-witted protagonist; outside… Read more »
Full transparency: all Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Fun City Editions, 88 Films, Arrow Video, and the Criterion Collection. It’s a juicy season for the devotees of the disc. Movies of all makes and models find their way on this month’s round up. From Fun City Editions, we have the end-of-the-’70’s-tinged neo-noir starring Lisa Eichhorn,… Read more »
Guest post by Chris Forrester. Ask any cinephile what unmade film haunts them the most and they’ll certainly have an answer. Maybe it’s Jodorowsky’s much-obsessed-over Dune adaptation, maybe it’s Kubrick’s Napoleon – trumped by the financial failure of Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo – or his version of A.I., eventually directed by Steven Spielberg in 2001 (of… Read more »