Ten Nights in a Barroom stands as another “race film” made by a white owned (or in this case co-owned) studio, in this case a Philadelphia based studio called the Colored Players Film Corporation. The CPFC was founded by David Starkman and Sherman H. Dudley, the former of whom was white and the latter of whom was black, though it appears to be that Starkman was the one more involved in producing the actual movies while Dudley was more the…
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Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore 1974
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore has often seemed like a little bit of an aberration in Martin Scorsese’s filmography and I don’t think that reputation is not entirely unearned. The movie comes directly between Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, two gritty and highly masculine movies about 70s New York, and this female centric PG-rated movie set in Arizona feels like a bit out of place. In Christopher Nolan terms this was sort of Scorsese’s Insomnia: a movie he made to…
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Valley of the Dolls 1967
I hadn’t seen Valley of the Dolls before now but I had seen its pseudo-sequel/spoof Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. I don’t think the two movies really have that much to do with each other but while watching the original movie I could kind of see why Russ Meyer would have been inspired to make it. I can just see him watching the movie and thinking “this has all the makings of an exploitation movie but they never actually…
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Robot Dreams 2023
This was the last movie I needed to see in order to say I’ve seen every movie nominated in any category for this year’s Oscars and the distributors seem to have hosted one night only screenings of it at a couple of local art houses specifically to accommodates weirdos like me who want to do that because it looks like it won’t be showing in general release until May or June. It’s kind of a shame this thing has such…
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Balloon 2018
Hollywood has a pretty long tradition of remaking foreign films but recently there’s been something of a trend of foreign filmmakers making “remakes” of Hollywood films, or perhaps more accurately making more authentic adaptations of local stories that had previously been made by Hollywood during an era where they were the only ones with the funds to make such projects. The recent German All Quiet on the Western Front is a good example of this, as is Society of the…
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The Flying Ace 1926
For far too long my copy of Kino’s “Pioneers of African American Cinema” sat on my shelf unwatched until last year I decided to finally do something about it and I did a whole crash course looking at the eight Oscar Micheaux movies that were in the set. I can’t say that all the movies held up but it was an interesting and rewarding experience nonetheless. However, that boxed set still has eight other movies from other various filmmakers on…
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A Question of Silence 1982
The 1982 Dutch film A Question of Silence recently appeared on the Criterion Channel as part of a Marleen Gorris retrospective, which is convenient because this is otherwise a difficult movie to find. The movie is considered something of a classic of feminist cinema and it’s not exactly subtle about being a movie about feminism either, it’s very much discussing the topics of being a woman in a “man’s world” directly. The film concerns a trial of three otherwise ordinary…
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Io Capitano 2023
The least widely seen and talked about of this year’s Best International Film nominees is most likely Italy’s submission Io Capitano, which is perhaps surprising given that the film was made by Matteo Garrone who is plainly one of Italy’s top three auteurs working today. The movie is not actually in the Italian language for the most part and is not set in Italy, rather it’s about a pair of Senegalese teenagers taking on the onerous journey from their home…
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Dune: Part Two 2024
We barely remember it now, but the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was very much a product of the post-COVID era of cinema releases. It came out in 2021 amid something of a variant surge and was even one of the movies that year which Warner Brothers opted to release day and date on HBO Max. There had of course been some other big movies released before then to some extent but most of them had been sequels in ongoing…
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Nouvelle Vague 1990
Jean-Luc Godard enters the 90s with this movie that is not dissimilar from the equally cryptic movies he made in the 80s. In the case of this one (which I had to use a weird Russian streaming site to see) I at least have some idea what he was going for. The movie is about a guy who gets saved on the side of the road by a rich person, lives with them for a bit, and is then allowed…
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Drive-Away Dolls 2024
It’s usually something of a mystery where one contributor’s influence ends and the others’ begins when people team up to direct movies, but when the split up it starts to become more clear and in the case of the Coen Brothers it’s become increasingly stark: when Joel made a movie on his own he came out with a black and white adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” while left to his own devices Ethan Coen made a sex comedy about lesbians on…
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Kiss the Future 2023
Kiss the Future is a documentary that looks at the Bosnian War of the early 90s through the lens of a handful of people who experienced it, namely some local rock bands in Sarajevo as well as a young American volunteer worker but most notably the rock band U2, who found themselves advocating around the conflict and eventually throwing a big victory concert in the city after the ceasefire. It’s a very heavily produced (perhaps even over-produced) and rather establishment-tinged…