Stars and stuff on the silver screen.
Noir means, of course, “black”; and it refers not only to the dark moods and bleak tone of American crime dramas of the ’40s and ’50s, but also to the impenetrable slabs of shadow that surround the violence and betrayal on screen. Much of what made noir what it is …
If you’d never seen Sunset Blvd. before — if you knew nothing about it, about its unique place in cinematic history, about the curious effect it had on both the public and the town it opened up like and old and ugly pornographic magazine — you’d be forgiven for wondering why it’s …
Noir is a hard thing to parody, because noir itself is so close to parody even in its purest form. We like to talk about it as a gritty, realistic form of cinema — and it is! At least, sort of. But in other ways, it’s so attenuated and abstracted, …
Before we get too much deeper into Noirvember, I’ve often been asked to provide a list of my all-time favorite noir films. This is painfully hard to do, because it’s like picking my favorite bastard child whose birth I had nothing to do with. It’s a lot of good movies, …
It’s Noirvember again, and I’m once more looking forward to a month of immersing myself into my all-time favorite film genre, with all its grubby shadows and lines that are sharp but never clean. When I was at the Chicago International Film Festival this year, I was intrigued by the …
The previous century was marked by the transformation of horror of the mind and soul to horror of the body and spirit, from childish night fears of ghosts and ghouls to real-life destruction and terror and an abstraction of horror into a genre of culture meant to turn our deepest …
“Welcome to the season premiere of BookTalk. This is our seventeenth season, and of course, we could never have gotten this far without your support. We’ve always aimed to bring you only the very best of in-depth discussions of literature and the fine arts, so of course I’m pleased to welcome …
A lot of factors can contribute to a filmmaker delivering the best work of his career. Circumstances from finding the right cast to discovering the right project to getting the ideal financing can combine to make all the difference in the world. Other times, it’s waiting until exactly the right …
Blade Runner — the original, which is to say whichever of the seemingly endless number of versions that are available thanks to studio meddling and the obsessive recutting of director Ridley Scott — is one of my favorite movies. Ill-received at the time of its release and scorned by some …
Harvey Weinstein is the latest. But he isn’t the last. The news that Weinstein, a prominent movie producer and one of Hollywood’s biggest power players, is at the very least a serial sexual harasser of women and at worst a multiple rapist has been met with varied reactions. It’s not …
Darren Aronofsky wants there to be no confusion about the intent behind his new allegorical whatever-it-is, mother!. (I use his preferred stylization of the title, even after everything he has done to me.) Eschewing such aesthetic values as subtlety and ambiguity, Aronofsky has delivered a psychological horror film that he is …
I don’t remember the Battle of the Sexes; I was far too young for it to penetrate my consciousness at age five, or to make anyone in the suburban enclave where I grew up to have much of a stake in it. But I do remember hearing about it, and, given the …
I wanted to like Wonder Woman. I really, really did. I’ve always enjoyed the character, for any number of reasons: the intriguing backstory of her creator and his motivations; her origin story, steeped in some of the stranger aspects of Greek mythology; her debut during the early days of America’s involvement …
It is giving no secrets away to say that, growing up, I was a huge nerd. I am, let us be honest, still a huge nerd, which is why you are reading these words on the pages of a decade-old blog instead of the pages of Entertainment Weekly. But in some fairly important …
I’m not normally a fan of horror movies. Even when they’re well-executed, they tend to be all surface and no depth; they tell us nothing about the human experience beyond the sensation of fear and our capacity for cruelty, which isn’t something many of us need to be reminded of. …
