Standing in an aquarium with his arms outstretched, the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes a cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but his presence is anything but gratuitous.  Like everything else in this poetically unified film, he is there to echo, relect, or comment upon some other aspect of the movie.  3 Women is a movie filled with doubles ... read more »

Director Robert Siodmak was born on August 8, 1900, in Dresden, Germany. If alive today, he would be 110. In 1994, in an article entitled Beyond the Golden Age: Film Noir Since the ’50s, I wrote: It is almost (but not quite) a rule of thumb that the more personal a director’s vision, the less ... read more »

The following short films, each less than one minute in length, were created for the compilation project, OneDreamRush. First, we have Asia Argento on the fluidity of SEXUAL IDENTITY. Next is Kenneth Anger looking - not for the first time - at DEATH. And finally, David Lynch looks - not for the first time - at DREAMING. I hadn’t ... read more »

Nine out of ten bloggers agree – the dreams in Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION are not particularly dream-like, at least, not much more so than the action sequences in your average James Bond film. Whether that makes INCEPTION a bad movie is another issue.  Nolan essentially uses the dream invasion scenario as a MacGuffin – an excuse to ... read more »

La Belle Captive (1983) is an erotic noir mystery by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad. It is also quite tongue-in-cheek. The following three images which appear in succession in the film capture something of the movie’s fetishistic flavor. If the last shot reminds you of the orgy sequence in Kubrick’s Eyes ... read more »