Otto Preminger had a thing for saintly blondes. The best known of Preminger’s saintly – and hauntingly beautiful – blondes was Jean Seberg whom Preminger discovered and cast as the lead in his version of Saint Joan (1957), but the archetype appears in his movies as far back as Alice Faye’s performance in Fallen Angel (1945 – the year ... read more »

For years, Stanley Kubrick’s independently financed first feature, Fear and Desire, was a suppressed film, next-to-impossible to see. The man responsible for suppressing it was Kubrick himself, because he considered his youthful effort to be “nothing more than a bumbling amateur film exercise . . . a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious.” One could ... read more »

As a tonic to all the hoopla surrounding The Hurt Locker and its Oscar win as Best Picture, we’re reprinting BL writer Jay Rothermel’s provocative review of the film, originally published on August 14, 2009 on the blog Marxist Update. * * * “The great ignored question raised by events depicted in The Hurt Locker ... read more »

The reason why Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker succeeds where every other Iraq War movie made to date has failed has little to do with the war itself. Audiences have generally avoided films dealing with this unpopular – and probably unwinnable – conflict/occupation. If The Hurt Locker seems as fresh and compelling as it does, ... read more »

There are three basic types of spy stories: 1) the one about the ultra-skilled professional spy who is almost always successful, e.g., James Bond; 2) the one about the civilian amateur who gets caught up in spy stuff, e.g., Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps; and 3) the one that depicts professional spying as a dirty depressing ... read more »

There’s a luxury civilian cinema goers have over most critics in formulating opinions on film, namely- the sweet cozy mechanics of memory, which can patch up loose ends in a film they’ve seen for days if not weeks afterwards, changing an initial unfavorable review to a big thumbs up. Most critics leave the theater and ... read more »

I just saw BOURNE ULTIMATUM but I don’t want to write about that. I want to write about the previews. There were about 10 of them. Here’s the ones I remember: Nic Cage in NATIONAL TREASURE 2, chasing after the sacred Harry Potter-esque tome that only presidents can read (it explains the JKF assasination and ... read more »