February––particularly its third week––is all about romance. Accordingly the Criterion Channel got creative with their monthly programming and, in a few weeks, will debut Interdimensional Romance, a series of films wherein “passion conquers time and space, age and memory, and even death and the afterlife.” For every title you might’ve guessed there’s a wilder companion: Alan Rudolph’s Made In Heaven, Soderbergh’s remake, and Resnais’ Love Unto Death. Mostly I’m excited to revisit Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, a likely essential viewing before Megalopolis.
February also marks Black History Month, and Criterion’s series will include work by Shirley Clarke (also subject of a standalone series), Garrett Bradley, Cheryl Dunye, and Julie Dash, while movies by Sirk, Minnelli, King Vidor, and Lang play in “Gothic Noir.” Greta Gerwig gets an “Adventures in Moviegoing” and can be seen in Mary Bronstein’s Yeast,...
February also marks Black History Month, and Criterion’s series will include work by Shirley Clarke (also subject of a standalone series), Garrett Bradley, Cheryl Dunye, and Julie Dash, while movies by Sirk, Minnelli, King Vidor, and Lang play in “Gothic Noir.” Greta Gerwig gets an “Adventures in Moviegoing” and can be seen in Mary Bronstein’s Yeast,...
- 1/11/2024
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
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“Lurid Love And Noir”
By Raymond Benson
Film historian Jeremy Arnold, who provides the excellent audio commentary as a supplement for the terrific Blu-ray release of Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, says the movie’s title is remarkably “lurid.” The Production Code people obviously had a problem with the title and tried to get it changed, but an appeal from up and coming star Burt Lancaster, whose newly formed production company (co-founded with Harold Hecht) made the picture, resulted in the “lurid” title staying in place.
The film does not live up to the implied sensationalism. While we do get a dark, at times brutal, and cynical piece of film noir, we also get an atypical love story at the picture’s heart.
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, from 1948, is based on a novel by Gerald Butler, and was adapted by...
“Lurid Love And Noir”
By Raymond Benson
Film historian Jeremy Arnold, who provides the excellent audio commentary as a supplement for the terrific Blu-ray release of Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, says the movie’s title is remarkably “lurid.” The Production Code people obviously had a problem with the title and tried to get it changed, but an appeal from up and coming star Burt Lancaster, whose newly formed production company (co-founded with Harold Hecht) made the picture, resulted in the “lurid” title staying in place.
The film does not live up to the implied sensationalism. While we do get a dark, at times brutal, and cynical piece of film noir, we also get an atypical love story at the picture’s heart.
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, from 1948, is based on a novel by Gerald Butler, and was adapted by...
- 8/21/2020
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
I was already in love with movies before someone showed me Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca at the tender age of nineteen, but something about it opened up a whole new world of cinema to me. You’d think it was the film’s acclaimed director or the mastery with which he brought Daphne Du Maurier’s gothic novel to the screen, but no, I can’t claim anything as respectable as that. Instead, it was the smiling woman pictured above who helped ease my way into black & white cinema. Joan Fontaine earned an Academy Award nomination, the first of three, for her performance as the second Mrs. de Winter, and she went on to win the Best Actress Oscar for her very next film, Hitchcock’s Suspicion. (She’s the only actor, male or female, to have ever won an Academy Award for one of his films.) I watched both in rapid succession before devouring several more...
- 12/16/2013
- by Rob Hunter
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Joan Fontaine, who won the Best Actress Oscar for Alfred Hitchcock's 1941 classic Suspicion, has died in her California home at age 96. Fontaine began her film career playing attractive but nondescript characters until Hitchcock cast her as the female lead in his 1940 film version of the bestseller Rebecca opposite Laurence Olivier. The film earned her an Oscar nomination and elevated her to one of Hollywood's most in-demand actresses. In 1943 she received a third and final Oscar nomination for The Constant Nymph. Fontaine also won rave notices in the film version of the Gothic novel Jane Eyre, starring opposite Orson Welles. In both films she played an innocent woman whose husband is harboring a shocking secret that is unveiled within the walls of a stately but foreboding country manor. Fontaine's other major films include Ivanhoe, The Emperor Waltz, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, This Above All, The Women, Gunga Din,...
- 12/16/2013
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Ohio-based extreme metallers Skeletonwitch can be relied upon to lay down a slab of blistering darkness every two years in the form of a new studio album, usually released (appropriately enough) around Halloween. This year is no exception, and it's also the band's tenth anniversary, so they're posed with the challenge of topping their already impressive game with their fifth full-length release Serpents Unleashed. Once again, the fairly dependable Skeletonwitch brand – being mainly riff-based, high-tempo thrash coupled with elements of melodic death and black metal – comes through with no bullshit and plenty of hellish fury. Also true to form, only one of the tracks on Serpents crosses the three-minute mark; as always they dive in, lay down the riffage and get the hell out with little to no showboating, which I find refreshing among the growing wave of thrash revivalists. The album blasts off the pad with the opening/title track and never looks back,...
- 11/7/2013
- by Gregory Burkart
- FEARnet
Joan Fontaine movies: ‘This Above All,’ ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ (photo: Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine in ‘Suspicion’ publicity image) (See previous post: “Joan Fontaine Today.”) Also tonight on Turner Classic Movies, Joan Fontaine can be seen in today’s lone TCM premiere, the flag-waving 20th Century Fox release The Above All (1942), with Fontaine as an aristocratic (but socially conscious) English Rose named Prudence Cathaway (Fontaine was born to British parents in Japan) and Fox’s top male star, Tyrone Power, as her Awol romantic interest. This Above All was directed by Anatole Litvak, who would guide Olivia de Havilland in the major box-office hit The Snake Pit (1948), which earned her a Best Actress Oscar nod. In Max Ophüls’ darkly romantic Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Fontaine delivers not only what is probably the greatest performance of her career, but also one of the greatest movie performances ever. Letter from an Unknown Woman...
- 8/6/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Mads Mikkelsen will receive the European Film Academy's European Achievement in World Cinema 2011 Honorary Award "in recognition of a unique contribution to the world of film." Previous recipients include Milos Forman, Roman Polanski, Antonio Banderas, Lars von Trier, Isabelle Huppert, Maurice Jarre, Liv Ullmann, Roberto Benigni, Gabriel Yared, and Victoria Abril. Among the Danish-born Mikkelsen's credits are Nicolas Winding Refn’s crime dramas Pusher (1996) and With Blood on My Hands: Pusher II (2004); Anders Thomas Jensen's The Green Butchers (2003) and Adam's Apples (2005); Susanne Bier's Open Hearts (2002) and the Oscar-nominated After the Wedding (2006); and Ole Christian Madsen's Flame and Citron (2008). Outside of Denmark, Mikkelsen was the creepy villain with the bleeding eye in Martin Campbell's Casino Royale (2006); Igor Stravinsky in Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009); a corporate go-getter with a past in Peter Lindmark's Swedish drama Exit (2009); One Eye in Winding Refn's English-language Valhalla Rising...
- 10/25/2011
- by Steve Montgomery
- Alt Film Guide
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