The Exorcist | Review by Pauline Kael
11/01/2018
Kael critiques “The Exorcist” for its shallow shock value and questions its cultural impact, calling out its lack of genuine depth or terror.
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MOVIES
Mean Streets: Everyday Inferno – Review by Pauline Kael
11/01/2018
Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emotional range that is dizzyingly sensual.
ON THE SET OF ‘BRAINSTORM’ WITH DOUGLAS TRUMBULL- by David Hutchison [Starlog]
11/01/2018
Behind the scenes of Douglas Trumbulls’s new movie ‘Brainstorm’
INTERVIEW WITH PRODUCER ALAN LADD, JR. [Starlog]
11/01/2018
At last, a studio executive who believes in science fiction. Starlog magazine interviews Alan Ladd, Jr.
JEAN-JACQUES ANNAUD: PREHISTORIC HEAT AN INTERVIEW WITH THE CREATOR OF ‘QUEST FOR FIRE’
11/01/2018
While audiences have long exhibited a penchant for movies about the future, few people expected today’s science-fiction generation to go wild over a film set 80,000 years in the past. Yet that’s what has happened with Quest for Fire, an ambitious work that portrays primitive man’s attempts to understand and harness the elements around him.
QUEST FOR FIRE (1981): ACTION/ADVENTURE AT THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION – by Ed Naha [Starlog]
11/01/2018
The domestication of fire was the key development that separated hominids from the rest of the animal kingdom, enabled them to live in hostile environments and spurred the development of language and agriculture. Through this brilliant exercise in backward extrapolation, we get a glimpse of what it might have been like, 80,00 years ago.
Blade Runner And Cyberpunk Visions Of Humanity
09/01/2018
Ridley Scott’s 1982 film ‘Blade Runner’ appeared just before William Gibson’s quintessential cyberpunk novel ‘Neuromancer’ was published in 1984, and the two share enough features that one might well retroactively call Blade Runner the first truly cyberpunk film.
DIANE JOHNSON: WRITING ‘THE SHINING’
08/01/2018
We each began by deconstructing King’s novel separately, reducing it to essential scenes, comparing our lists of scenes, and winnowing them down to a hundred or so. I tore bits of exposition and dialogue out of a paperback copy of the novel and put them in little envelopes on which were written “# 1 The Arrival,” and so on.
Eyes Wide Shut: Introducing Sociology – by Tim Kreider
08/01/2018
Critical disappointment with Eyes Wide Shut was almost unanimous, and the complaint was always the same: not sexy. The national reviewers sounded like a bunch of middle-school kids who’d snuck in to see it and slunk out three hours later feeling horny, frustrated, and ripped off.
2001, un’odissea al parallelepipedo | Recensione di Ennio Flaiano
08/01/2018
L’ironia di Kubrick resta sempre fredda, il suo umorismo sereno, forse perciò più toccante. Si limita a prospettare l’eccezionale come raggiunto e quindi divenuto usuale, quotidiano, fine a se stesso.
The Color Purple (1985) | Review by Pauline Kael
05/01/2018
If you’re among the millions of people who have read the book, you probably expect the actors to be more important than they turn out to be. The movie is amorphous; it’s a pastoral about the triumph of the human spirit, and it blurs on you.
EYES WIDE SHUT: I WAKE UP DREAMING – Review by J. Hoberman
05/01/2018
The best thing about Eyes Wide Shut may be its title, but anyone planning to see Stanley Kubrick’s long-awaited, posthumously released swan song is advised to go with their eyes open.
CAPE FEAR (1962, 1991): THE SHADOW WITHIN – by Jenny Diski [Sight and Sound]
01/01/2018
Novelist of ‘Nothing Natural’, Jenny Diski, watches a video of the first ‘Cape Fear’ and the Scorsese remake – and compares them
David Lynch’s The Elephant Man – Review by Bruce Kawin [Film Quarterly]
31/12/2017
Not since Shakespeare called for “a muse of fire” in Henry V and Olivier provided the light of an arc-rod projector has there been such an interesting opportunity to examine the relations between film and theater as David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.
STANLEY KUBRICK’S LAST FILM – BY AMY TAUBIN [FILM COMMENT]
31/12/2017
To be blunt about it, it’s impossible at this moment to separate thoughts and feelings about Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut from the fact of his death. Or to put it another way, Kubrick’s death is the closure that his final film, for better or worse, resists to the last.
Reservoir Dogs: Redemption in a Postmodern World
29/12/2017
Tarantino is widely recognized as a quintessentially postmodern neo-noir filmmaker. His films are postmodern in the artistic sense, insofar as they are, for example, blends of genres and highly allusive. But they’re also postmodern in terms of the underlying epistemology and the position on morality and values that they take.
Straw Dogs (1971) – Review by David Denby
28/12/2017
Although Peckinpah’s general attitudes turn out to be reactionary to the point of madness, he has never functioned better as a filmmaker: Straw Dogs is a hateful but very exciting movie.
Dirty Harry: Saint Cop – Review by Pauline Kael
28/12/2017
Dirty Harry is obviously just a genre movie, but this action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced. Since crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice, Dirty Harry is a deeply immoral movie.
LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS (AMANTI PERDUTI, 1945) – di Teresa Gunnella [Ciak]
27/12/2017
Il più famoso film francese, omaggio all’arte della scena, venne girato fra mille difficoltà durante l’occupazione nazista
Schindler’s List: Intervista a Steven Spielberg – di Gabriel Erem [CIAK]
27/12/2017
Steven Spielberg parla del suo ultimo film ‘Schindler’s List’ e del suo rapporto con l’ebraismo