“Hundreds of Thousands of Hours of Moments”: On Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake (2015)
In a recent interview, the English filmmaker Adam Curtis described finding “hidden levels in the BBC archive” where a vast collection of extraneous footage has been accumulating over the last[...] The...
View Article“The Greatest Film About Race Ever Filmed in Hollywood”: Richard Fleischer’s...
Editor’s note: Bob Keser passed away on Oct. 5, 2015, from cardiac arrest, age 72. Although we never met, he was an important member of the Bright Lights team and a[...] The post “The Greatest Film...
View ArticleSh! The Horror! 13 Suggestions for an Uncommon Halloween Viewing Experience
Editor’s note: We’re posting Erich “Mr. Acidemic” Kuersten’s viewing guide a couple of days before Halloween to give our readers a chance to locate these “cool and strange” suggestions spanning...
View ArticleMexican Roadtrips: Güeros, Sicaros, and the Search for Mexico
Güeros is the story of a search without an object, and it offers an approach to making political art that dwells not in the illusion of authenticity, but in the[...] The post Mexican Roadtrips:...
View ArticleA Tale of Two Bookshops: Sex and Books and The Big Sleep
We missed World Book Day (March 3) this year, but what the heck. Let’s celebrate all things literary anyway by re-presenting Paroma Chatterjee’s witty take on those two alluring cinematic spaces:[...]...
View ArticleMia of the Spirits: Woody Allen’s Alice (1990)
Alice isn’t all high-concept reverie and mystical melancholy. After a series of self-consciously arthouse films and sombre homages – and bookended between Another Woman and Crimes and Misdemeanours on...
View ArticleThe Not-So-Straight Story: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
Today – January 20 – is David Lynch’s birthday (he’s 71). To honor one of the true originals of le cinema moderne – and to remind ourselves of the importance[...] The post The Not-So-Straight Story:...
View ArticleWatch It Again! Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Hitchcock’s one-word titles have never been so instructive. Psycho is the feeling of being preyed on by your self, as by one of Norman’s stuffed birds. It is the primal[...] The post Watch It Again!...
View ArticleGetting It Right the Second Time: Adapting Ben-Hur for the Screen
This is an updated and revised version of Gordon Thomas’s article first posted in Bright Lights in May 2006, reposted to celebrate Easter. * * * Bigger is better this[...] The post Getting It Right the...
View Article“Tolstoy and Only Tolstoy. Nothing Comes from Us”: Sergei Bondarchuk’s War...
“What do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” – Henry James, from the preface of his novel The Tragic[...] The post...
View ArticleCelebrating National Pet Memorial Day (Sept. 13): Good Dog/Bad Dog: The...
Today, September 13 (the second Sunday of September), is National Pet Memorial Day, and we can’t think of a single cinematic pet more deserving of memorializing than that ill-fated, long-suffering[...]...
View ArticleInfinite Jest: The Big Lebowski
"What makes The Big Lebowski seem so circuitous is that, in moving from A to B to C, the plot keeps dawdling at points of interest along the way, stopping to admire the scenery before picking up and...
View ArticleWatch It Again! Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve
Ocean’s Twelve finds itself the black sheep of the trio, inspiring bewilderment and even scorn for its lax attitude toward typical genre beats and for its gutsy meta gambit, which[...] The post Watch...
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