Despite the fact that women worked in the film industry's story and editing departments since practically the birth of the medium, Kael was really the first woman to gain serious notoriety as a reviewer.

Both my wife and I took a class from a professor named Lipschitz—Kind of a big name in American Studies.

SOME LIKE IT HOT is the better than the other films mentioned (although CLASH BY NIGHT is, until the end, seriously undrrated), but Monroe's performance in BUS STOP is her most nuanced.

It's hard to believe that a collection this obvious hasn't been done this thoroughly before. 

It's a bit more Christmasy, but I like MIRACLE OF MORGANS CREEK, which works primarily because the sentimentality is undercut by the absurdity of its premise.

I ought to stop writing this Mr. Magoo style

I'm more generous, liking Carpenter's subversive wit and thematic continuity, but on the whole he seems like a filmmaker who hit a wall, never developing his full potential.  A studio system line of production may have allowed him to expand his range, as evidenced in STARMAN and ELVIS.  To get funding he had to do…

This just in:  The Academie de Music in Paris just unearched an unreleased recording of Maurice Chevalier singing "All Along the Watchtower"

Well, I just hears Frankie Valli's cover of "Don't Think Twice" last week, although the one under discussion takes the cake.

My sense, as a recent refugee from Academia, is that among the younger tenure rack faculty there is more enthusiasm for criticism than for the medium itself.  If you are a cinephile it is difficult to express yourself amidst the din of obscurantist theory floating around the film studies departments.

When I saw this in 16mm in the 90s it didn't seem to have the flow of THE LAST LAUGH, and the intertitles in what was an english version seemed intrusive in a way theat the minimalists texts in other Murnau films weren't.  Gotta see ther restoration.

What makes Carpenter so intriguing is how he he admires the professional ethos of Hawks characters, and the laconic style that Hawks employed in depicting their adventures, yet undercuts the assurance that these values can persevere in an environment ruled by forces that operate outside of the realm of human…

Strange as it may sound, Rin Tin Tin was one of the biggest stars of his era, and is credited to helping keep his studio (Fox?) solvent in the 20s.

Just like to point out that, when addressing the authorship of Shakespeare's plays and poems it's deemed appropriate to attack the elitist bias of the proponants, while such bias is never pointed out in reviews of, let's say, THE KING'S SPEECH, which unquestionably posits the inherent necessity of royal authority at…

Of the American "primitives" championed by French critics in the late 50s/60s, Aldrich is at once the most recognizable in his unrelenting cynicism, and the most uneven in the quality of his output.  I haven't seen this one, but based on this and other things I've heard about it, it's pretty clear on which side it…

Movies are like the war monuments erected public parks.  When placed they commemorate a person or event, but over time they become associated with other events.  A memorial erected in solemn remembrence of a war or tragedy will become remeembered for holiday celebrations, protests, romantic trysts and the like.  The…

To Dark Passenger Airbag:I guess that there are different ways to interpret Misskelley's actions vis a vis his confessions.  Your interpretation  is reasonable and consistent, but so are those proclaiming the defendent's innocence.  Numerous defenders of the WM3 are also aware of, and have discussed the facts…

I know that this is a repost from a few weeks ago, but I believe that a few responses are in order:

I show the section of the PBS American Masters documentary on Griffith dealing with the BIRTH OF A NATION controversy.  I generally don't feel the need to bring up Riefenstall, finding her work turgid, ham fisted and ridiculous even when it isn't shilling for the Third Reich.  As for teaching W.W. II, TRIUMPH OF THE…

You just named two movies that can be conclusively be proven to have contributed to the commission of acts of genocidal violence in the 20th century.  They are the only films that I unrepentantly censor in my history/film classes specifically because their legacy of violence isn't just abstract but demonsterable.