For many years, I was terrified of The Mummy. After seeing bits and pieces of it at my aunt and uncle’s house as a little girl, I was… well, traumatized. So much so that I couldn’t even bear to watch the film in its entirety until last year at the age of 26. Not only… Read more »
Full transparency: All Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Kino Lorber, Criterion, Code Red, and Arrow Video. This month’s round-up is an eclectic bunch, which, if you know me at this point, is a good thing. Things are beginning to lean towards the change of seasons thematically. There is a Carl Reiner/Steve Martin comedy-noir collab called… Read more »
Guest post by Emma Kearney. Gene Tierney worked at Twentieth Century Fox between 1940 and 1955, most notably in the film noirs Laura and Leave Her to Heaven. In these roles, she played two poles of the femme fatale trope: the New York dame who isn’t really all that fatal and the housewife who really… Read more »
There’s always been something about cinephilia, particularly that classic form of cinephilia (well known to many us) which fetishizes old Hollywood films, that strikes me as a little bit morbid. Films capture a series of moves and gestures that remain permanent — the movies always stay the same, though our reactions change almost invariably with… Read more »
How do you solve a problem like Maria? That’s the question on many people’s lips in You Were Never Lovelier, a stellar 1942 musical about an American dancer (Fred Astaire) who is mistaken for the secret admirer of Maria Acuña (Rita Hayworth), an Argentinian hotelier’s daughter. As embodied by Hayworth, Maria is a clever and… Read more »
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) revolves around a refusal of a woman to be looked at. Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) will not sit for her own portrait, because she knows that portrait is the means to take her into an unwanted marriage with an unknown man. It’s the 18th century, though, and… Read more »