Great Movies
TV/Streaming
Home Entertainment Guide: June 2023
A guide to the latest and greatest on Blu-ray and streaming, including Evil Dead Rise, Avatar: The Way of Water, John Wick: Chapter 4, and a 4K release of The Rules of the Game.
A guide to the latest and greatest on Blu-ray and streaming, including Evil Dead Rise, Avatar: The Way of Water, John Wick: Chapter 4, and a 4K release of The Rules of the Game.
The official obituary for renowned producer and Telluride Film Festival founder Tom Luddy.
The book encompasses both sharp analysis and detailed accounts of what Robert Warshow would call her direct experiences of film.
The latest on streaming and Blu-ray, including 21 Bridges, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and a Criterion edition of Roma.
Dušan Makavejev used film as a ladder to climb the mental prison walls that he believed imprisoned so many others.
A tribute to the legendary Italian filmmaker, Bernardo Bertolucci.
A celebration of Anna Magnani's acting career on the occasion of a retrospective at the Lincoln Center running May 18-June 1.
An analysis of recent faith-based releases, including "God's Not Dead" and "Heaven Is For Real."
Sheila writes: Who doesn't love a good title sequence? I have my favorites. What are yours? The Art of the Title is a wonderful site that focuses on title sequences and in a recent post Ben Radatz and Bill Perkins write, "There are certain narrative, technical, and graphic techniques for which title design is an ideal venue. Because of its short format and creative license — and sometimes because of their budgets — title sequence real estate is often used to explore elaborate, abstract worlds previously unknown or unseen. For this reason — combined with an enduring human fascination with how things tick — Inner Workings is a theme that is frequented by a broad spectrum of genres (though, to be fair, most often by sci-fi and fantasy)." They break down some of their favorite title sequences, and how the sequences work visually and thematically. Lots of food for thought! Here's the whole post. Enjoy!
Women saving film criticism; The wonderfully unique Shailene Woodley; BuzzFeed hires Allison Wilmore as their first film critic; Revisiting George Lucas' American Graffiti; Sex in Pasolini films.
Click above to REALLY enlarge...
UPDATED 01/28/10: 2:25 p.m. PST -- COMPLETED!: Thanks for all the detective work -- and special thanks to Christopher Stangl and Srikanth Srinivasan himself for their comprehensive efforts at filling the last few holes! Now I have to go read about who some of these experimental filmmakers are. I did find some Craig Baldwin movies on Netflix, actually...
Srikanth Srinivasan of Bangalore writes one of the most impressive movie blogs on the web: The Seventh Art. I don't remember how I happened upon it last week, but wow am I glad I did. Dig into his exploration of connections between Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" and Jean-Luc Godard's "History of Cinema." Or check out his piece on James Benning's 1986 "Landscape Suicide." There's a lot to look through, divided into sections for Hollywood and World Cinema.
In the section called "The Cinemaniac... I found the above collage (mosaic?) of mostly-famous faces belonging to film directors, which Srikanth says he assembled from thumbnails at Senses of Cinema. Many of them looked quite familiar to me, and if I'm not mistaken they were among the biographical portraits we used in the multimedia CD-ROM movie encyclopedia Microsoft Cinemania, which I edited from 1994 to 1998, first on disc, then also on the web. (Anybody with a copy of Cinemania able to confirm that? My Mac copy of Cinemania97 won't run on Snow Leopard.)
View image No comment.
How good, or bad, does a movie have to be in order to make an impression -- enough of one, anyway, so that you can remember it, or even still feel like talking about it, 15 minutes after you've seen it? Inspired by "The Hottie and the Nottie," Joe Queenan suggests criteria for The Worst Movies of All Time ("From hell") in The Guardian.
Among the movies he considers: "Futz!" (a 1969 satire, based on a hit LaMaMa Broadway production, about a man who marries a pig), Marco Ferreri's "La Grande Bouffe" (1973), John Huston's "A Walk With Love and Death," Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo: 120 Days of Sodom," Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful" ("as morally repugnant -- precisely because of its apparent innocence -- as any film I can name"), Kevin Costner's "The Postman," Martin Brest's "Gigli" and Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate." Queenan writes: A generically appalling film like "The Hottie and the Nottie" is a scab that looks revolting while it is freshly coagulated; but once it festers, hardens and falls off the skin, it leaves no scar. By contrast, a truly bad movie, a bad movie for the ages, a bad movie made on an epic, lavish scale, is the cultural equivalent of leprosy: you can't stand looking at it, but at the same time you can't take your eyes off it. You are horrified by it, repelled by it, yet you are simultaneously mesmerised by its enticing hideousness....
The Festival International du Film, held annually in Cannes, France, has become the world's most prestigious film festival—the spot on the beach where the newest films from the world's top directors compete for both publicity and awards.
