by Bosley Crowther In discussing The Shop on Main Street, I spoke of the characteristic style of many of the Czechoslovakian films of the 1960s
In his compact little study of California writers, The Boys in the Back Room, Edmund Wilson comments on the problems inherent in the close affiliation
by Bosley Crowther In light of the phenomenal popularity of George Lukas’ 1977 Star Wars, which seems to have done for science fiction movies what
Only a day before the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Samuel Beckett, I confided to my class in film history that Buster Keaton’s vision of the world was in some ways more profoundly absurdist than Samuel Beckett’s.
Like Mailer, Dylan is an artist who intended to do something in advance of conventional movies—more poetic, more ‘true’—yet “Renaldo and Clara,” like Mailer’s “Wild 90,” “Beyond the Law” and “Maidstone,” is marked by an absence of artistic intelligence. The picture hasn’t been thought out in terms of movement or a visual plan.
I submit that, if we are going to be moved to thought and action by The Deer Hunter, it ought to be by the implications of its true subject: the limitations for our society of the traditions of male mystique, the hobbling by sentimentality of a community that, after all the horror, still wants the beeriness of “God Bless America” instead of a moral rigor and growth that might help this country.
Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42 is a memory movie, written, directed and acted with such uncommon good humor that I don’t think you’ll be put off by its sweet soft-focus, at least until you start analyzing it afterwards.
However distant it may seem at first glance, Apocalypse Now remains not only deeply indebted to Conrad’s tale but not fully comprehensible without reference to it
In The Power of Adaptation in “Apocalypse Now” Marsha Kinder critically compares and contrasts the film and the novel. In this article, Kinder states that “Coppola rarely hesitates to change Conrad’s story-setting, events, characters-whenever the revision is required by the Vietnam context.”
Whatever tempted Kubrick to adapt the novel A Clockwork Orange and deal with its extraordinary difficulties, his methods of rising to their challenges were equally extraordinary in themselves—so much so that he ended up creating a film that is richer than its source in texture and, in its extension and development of certain thematic implications, more resonant as well.
A director is a kind of idea and taste machine; a movie is a series of creative and technical decisions, and it’s the director’s job to make the right decisions as frequently as possible. Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man.
The Tramp. The Little Fellow. Naturally the obituaries were full of those terms, full of references to the bowler-hatted, cane-swinging, corner-skidding outsider who had become one of the perdurable icons in the collective mind of the world. All true; still it’s not quite enough. Yes, the Tramp is now a deathless image. Yes, he made us laugh and cry and presumably always will.
Beautiful pictures are not film style. Kubrick’s latter-day work is solipsist and smug, isolated and sterile. For me Barry Lyndon is an anti-film, a gorgeous, stultified bore.
Reservoir Dogs is one of many films, past and present, that either flirt with or fully incorporate homosexual innuendo, expanding the vast symbolic field that homosexuality embraces. Its subtextual strategy mirrors the longstanding suppression and willful concealment of homoerotic desire in our society.
On his instruction, the pair of detectives have escorted their prisoner to the middle of nowhere. One of them guards him, while the other goes to check on a cardboard box that’s just been mysteriously delivered…
Kubrick’s future shock satire, A Clockwork Orange, is twice the movie it was accused of being
Slaughterhouse-Five is a masterly film, triumphantly original, wittily humane and piercingly cogent
In this essay on The Shining, Paul Miers asserts that “to understand Kubrick’s achievement one must attempt a reading of the mass-market book on which it is based.”
A rare, intimate glimpse into the life and mind of Jordan Peterson, the academic and best-selling author who captured the world’s attention with his criticisms of political correctness and his life-changing philosophy on discovering personal meaning. Christened as the most influential public intellectual in the western world, University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson skyrocketed to fame after he published a controversial viral video series entitled “Professor Against Political Correctness” in 2016. Within 2 years, he sold over 3 million copies of his self-help book, 12 RULES FOR LIFE, and became simultaneously branded by some as an academic rockstar selling out theatres around the world, and by others as a dangerous threat to progressive society. THE RISE OF JORDAN PETERSON intimately traces the transformative period of Peterson’s life while visiting rare moments with his family, friends and foes who share their own versions of the Jordan Peterson story.
Credo che ormai sarebbe ingenuo venire a raccontare Accattone al lettore. È da un anno che periodicamente l’Italia è costretta ad occuparsene. Il nostro è un Paese buffo. In nessun altro Paese normale un film come questo sarebbe diventato un affare di Stato.
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