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Performance

“There sure is a lot swirling around in Performance, but I’m not convinced it all adds to much of anything. Performance seems more content in throwing its ideas around and not to engage with them in any meaningful way, and it all becomes a sensory overload before the end. Although, calling it the e” read more

Something Wild

“John Waters described Kitten with a Whip as “a failed art film,” and I think that description can carry over to Something Wild, the obscure tale of a cinematic sexpot emoting after sexual trauma and trading one abusive relationship for another. There’s something wonderful underneath the hyster” read more

Craig's Wife

“Thank god Dorothy Arzner made Craig’s Wife instead of a male director. It would be so easy to tip Harriet Craig into a monstrous harpy and to side with the “put upon” husband. It would only embolden the patriarchy’s vision of marriage as an imprisonment for men with women as a controlling ba” read more

Christopher Strong

“I’m tempted to give a long, rambling preamble about the history and importance of Dorothy Arzner, pioneering queer director during the Hollywood’s studio era, and how her later reexamination by feminist and queer theorist salvaged her work from the dustbin of history. I’m refrain, but just kno” read more

Mother

“Poignant and absurd in equal measure, Albert Brooks taps into the conflicted push-and-pull at the heart of parent/child relationships. Vulnerable, pleading, and anxious in an equilibrium that’s daring to watch, Mother finds Brooks going full Oedipal complex as a man reexamining his life choices, m” read more

Always

“Steven Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss have both mentioned a deep love and appreciation for 1944’s A Guy Named Joe and discussed remaking it as far back as 1975’s Jaws. A Guy Named Joe is one of those heavily romantic studio era films that easily moved into magical realism territory. You buy into” read more

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

“The late 60s were a confusing, unmooring time for everyone, especially those expositing the virtues of total honesty and “free love.” Enter Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a comedy not so much about wife-swapping as it is about the confusion of the era of its making. “” read more

Uptight

“More fascinating as thought experiment than it is satisfying as finished film, Uptight is still a complicated, contradictory experience that’s worth the effort. How often do you come across something that’s an update of classic John Ford movie, this time substituting Irish revolutionaries for a ” read more

Moonrise

“The cycle of violence becomes an ever-widening gyre in Frank Borzage’s Moonrise. Less a violent story than a story about violence, and there is a difference between the two, where each successive action strengths that cycle of violence and chaos. The aftereffects of a parent’s death by capital p” read more

Gaslight

“Time to demonstrate my gay card as I speak positively over Gaslight’s two hours of diva in full martyrdom! George Cukor’s gothic melodrama about a naïve young wife being slowly driven insane by her gold-digging husband is a lot of fun. It’s as atmospherically cluttered and inky as a Universal” read more

Two-Faced Woman

“If you’ve ever wanted to watch a rigidly square peg try to slink into a round hole, then Two-Faced Woman is the film for you! It’s not that Greta Garbo couldn’t do comedy, she’s a sensation in Ninotchka, but that film built humor around her dour, serious iconography and found a sly way to su” read more

Little Women

“Louisa May Alcott’s oft-filmed story gets a wonderfully warm, charming, if rushed treatment in George Cukor’s celebrated version. Two prior silent film versions, from 1917 and 1918 respectively, beat this one to the screen, but this was the first version where all the disparate pieces came toget” read more

Our Betters

“Our Betters wants to both titillate us with its tale of the idle rich and their different rules for love, marriage, and society while finger wagging over amorality. It wants to build up its main character, an American socialite who married into the British upper class, while also slut shaming her to” read more

What Price Hollywood?

“While not exactly the foundational brick for the four official versions of A Star Is Born (to date, tick-tock on the fifth), What Price Hollywood? is still owed a debt of gratitude and payment when discussing those films. If you were to officially rank it among the four, it would slide obviously abo” read more