Ginger Rogers, who died April 25 at the age of 83, embodied star power with unsurpassed subtlety. Born Virginia McMath in Independence, Missouri (a location with a name so symbolically right it sounds invented), she was primed for stardom at age six when her ambitious mother took her on the…
For nearly three decades, some of Hollywood’s most powerful African-American players have labored unsuccessfully to bring the story of the Black Panther Party to the big screen. The father-son filmmaking duo of Melvin and Mario Van Peebles has managed to make the dream come true, and “dreamlike” is certainly the…
Why do people on the witness stand lie about stuff that doesn’t even matter? “Isn’t it true, Mr. Mossfelt, that before you identified this man as the thief, you were complaining that your contact lenses were dirty?” And all Mr. Mossfelt has to do is say, “Yeah, they were dirty.”…
The Perez Family and My Family (Mi Familia) are full of hardship, deprivation, bitterness, and death, yet they’re ultimately optimistic. They remind us that no matter how terrible our daily lives might seem, for our immigrant predecessors, life was almost certainly worse. These movies don’t glance off of you the…
About 20 minutes into the French-Italian melodrama Farinelli, a spoiled courtesan summons the greatest castrato singer of 18th century Europe, Farinelli (Stefano Dionisi), to a private meeting with her and dozens of tittering ladies fair. All of them are astounded by the three-octave range of this slender, incendiary beauty who…
In the past two decades, filmmaker John Carpenter has directed 17 movies, and has established himself as a towering figure in modern horror. In technical terms, he’s some kind of lowbrow genius: he has a better idea of how to build unease through freaky camera movements, dissonant sound effects, and…
As Jim Carroll, the teenage prep-school junkie hero of The Basketball Diaries, Leonardo DiCaprio is so brilliant he’s scary. He’s only 20, but he has the expressiveness and assurance of someone who’s been starring in films for decades. He gives you everything he has to give, yet at the same…
Whether Oscar-nominated actor Leonardo DiCaprio chooses to identify himself as “gay” is entirely his business. Where once the issue of outing celebrities sharply divided the gay and lesbian community, there has been a growing consensus that the reluctance of the mainstream press to discuss such “personal” issues is hypocritical, since…
How come all the people who defend porno act like they hate porno? You ever notice this? There’s always some guy in a corduroy coat, the professor of institutional mediocrity at Wyoming State Technical Institute, and he’s being interviewed by Dick Cavett or William F. Buckley or somebody. He says,…
The name Kenneth Anger conjures different associations, depending on who you’re talking to–and assuming, of course, that the person has heard of him to begin with. Anger, who will visit Dallas April 28 and 29 in conjunction with Las Colinas’ Mandalay Festival of Arts, is a multifaceted legend. He’s a…
The past couple of months have already seen an ongoing, gay-themed series of midnight movies cosponsored by the Inwood Theater and The Met, and a Silver Anniversary USA Film Festival schedule rich in gay and lesbian-themed features. Which means that the organizers of the 1995 Gay & Lesbian Festival, which…
I’ve tried credit cards. I can’t do it. I get a little surprise in the mail every month, and when I open it, I go, “I did not spend 700 bucks on phone sex. I know it wasn’t a penny over 650.” I’ve tried checking accounts. After one week, I…
The Cahiers du Cinema-era French film critics coined a name for the American crime drama of the ’40s and ’50s, in which every technical effort was extended to forge a mood of sordidness and epic struggle. They called it film noir–a genre in which ticket-buyers were carried roller coaster-style through…
Paul Schrader, thank God. On the occasion of the USA Film Festival’s 25th anniversary, there could not be a more inspired and appropriate choice to receive the organization’s Great Director award than this bookish, bespectacled, 48-year-old auteur. With the possible exception of Martin Scorsese, no working American director in his…
Note: The 25th Annual USA Film Festival runs Thursday, April 20 through Thursday, April 27 at the AMC Glen Lakes theater, 9450 North Central Expressway (except for The Stars Fell on Henrietta and Panther, which will be screened at the General Cinema NorthPark III-IV, North Central Expressway at Park Lane)…
Filmmakers Andrew Behar, Sara Sackner, and their collaborators sure had their work cut out for them when they decided to follow the Grateful Dead and their fans around the country last year and make a film about that particular subculture. The shoot itself yielded some interesting material, including details about…
Panther is a film that many powerful inhabitants of black Hollywood dreamed of making for years–a biography of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, which started in San Francisco and spread steadily out across the United States, breeding black pride and fostering white rage wherever its members reared their…
Filmmaker Gregory Nava’s My Family (Mi Familia), a multigenerational epic about a Chicano family in East Los Angeles, is one of the most satisfying dramas I’ve ever seen. The narrative follows the changing fortunes of the Sanchez family from the early part of the century through the late 1970s. It…
Maybe you’ve been in a bookstore or a cappuccino shoppe lately and heard a Catholic religious service going on through the Muzak. This is not a mistake. They’re playing this stuff in singles bars. It’s weird. You got these monks in black hoods, chanting like automatons, as part of the…
The biggest controversy at this year’s Academy Awards was the omission of Hoop Dreams from the Best Documentary category. That film dealt with two families struggling to survive economic hardship, framed by the saga of two teenage boys pressured to make the NBA and rescue their households. But also snubbed…
There’s only one dud among the seven somber short films featured in Short Stuff. It’s a pretentious fantasy flight called “Goddess” in which a Mary Kay-shellacked female icon becomes human in order to avenge the death of a man by his twin brother. Yawn. But two films punch you in…
Film lovers can be divided into two categories. There are those who approach the cinema with a Wildean belief that art exists to improve the human condition, or at the very least idealize it. They watch movies using a kind of aesthetic white glove test, always on the lookout for…
