Guest post by Caleb Allison. Paramount’s erotic and atmospheric ghost story The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944) sets up a salacious mystery before one sees even a single frame of the film. Who, exactly, is being uninvited and from what? Turning the film’s simple yet provocative title into an interrogative proposition leads us down a tortuous… Read more »
Full transparency: all Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Kino Lorber, Criterion, Code Red, and Cohen Film Collection. The semester has started, summer is coming to a close, but the Blu-ray reviews are back in full swing. If there was a theme to this month’s titles, it would be stellar performances and star personas, with the… Read more »
In the 2003 film The Matrix Revolutions, Hugo Weaving as the character Agent Smith stands over Keanu Reeves’ beaten and muddied Neo. It’s a short reprieve in their baroque and awe-inspiring final confrontation. Rain pouring down, lightning flashing as billions (with a “B”) of copy-and-pasted Smiths watch as the original Smith grits his teeth with… Read more »
As Robert Preston cuts her hair, Julie Andrews tries to clarify the charade that they are going to perpetuate: “A woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman?” Preston gleefully responds, “It’s so preposterous, no one would ever believe it!” This is the simplified foundation of Blake Edwards’s Victor/Victoria (1982), a comedy… Read more »
An iconoclastic talent, Barbara Hammer has been leaving her mark on cinema for over five decades. The author of numerous thought-provoking, audacious works, Hammer has received many awards and honors, while also breaking barriers with her exploration of such topics as lesbianism, aging, the female body, and mainstream portrayals of women and homosexuality. Later this… Read more »
Guest post by Eric Zobel. Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s I-Be Area (2007) is an anarchic tour-de-force. Written, directed, and edited by Trecartin, the film tosses viewers into a hallucinogenic virtual world that is both Crayola colorful and utterly confusing. Using forms of new media, the tropes of soap opera and reality TV, and non-narrative filmmaking… Read more »