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Venice 2018: A dazzling second feature
Kristin here: In my first report from the Venice International Film Festival, I described the excitement of seeing three excellent and quite varied films right in a row, at consecutive early-morning...
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REINVENTING HOLLYWOOD in paperback: Artisans and artistry
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Production still from lost scene. DB here: This is the third blog entry amplifying on the paperback edition of Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed...
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THE LIGHTHOUSE: A period film with period style
Kristin here: David and I first saw Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse at the Vancouver International Film Festival, and he wrote briefly about it at the time. About halfway through the screening or less,...
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VAMPYR and more on the Criterion Channel
DB here: Busy times! I’ve gone back to teaching this semester, and we’re revising Film History: An Introduction. So we’ve been kept from posting as often as we’d like. For the moment just let me...
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TRAPPED: Low-budget flash is good for you
Trapped (1949). DB here: Films of the 1940s sported many vivid titles, from Double Indemnity to The Best Years of Our Lives. But a lot of them really didn’t try too hard. We have Dangerous Lady,...
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THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL as fetish object
DB here: Question: Why is the window in the cell door a different shape in different shots? An answer, and other observations, can be found in my video essay included in the new Criterion edition...
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Sometimes a swordfight . . .
The Valiant Ones (Zhonglie tu, 1975). DB here: . . . makes you sit up. And notice a simple but ingenious cinematic technique. One of the refrains of this blog is: We want to know filmmakers’ secrets,...
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Mirror neurons and cinema: Further discussion
The Fugitive (1993). DB here: How do we respond to films? How are they designed to have effects on us? How do our responses outrun the “programmed” effects filmmakers aim to create? These are...
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1917 and DUNKIRK: A conversation
1917 (2019). DB here: For over twenty years, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia at Athens has hosted Cinema Roundtable, a series of film screenings and...
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Five critics, one of them a killer
Goodfellas (1990). DB here: Fourteen months of being house-bound gave me plenty of chance to catch up on my reading. But the reading was almost all devoted to the book I was writing on mystery plots...
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