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During the early and mid-years of the 20th Century, movie audiences enjoyed laughing at shenanigans of Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx brothers. They hummed along with musical numbers in Footlight Parade, Forty-Second Street, The Bandwagon and Singin’ in the Rain. They even enjoyed shrieking with fright at Dracula, Frankenstein, and the 1950s horror films of Vincent Price and Christopher Lee.
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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a debut feature-length animated film by French composer Pierre Foldes, has been released this summer in English to several streaming sources and on disc from Zeitgeist Films and Kino Lorber. The visuals are clean and direct in style, and they never overpower the characters they present nor the stories they tell.
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Picture this. The Mohawk Valley a few weeks ago. The bad air from forest fires in Canada had returned. It was hot and muggy. Weather forecasters said stay in the house. I was vexed, I was in a mood I couldn’t break. I tried to end my sulky state by viewing the recent star-studded comedies for the post-menopausal generation… 80 for Brady and Ticket to Paradise.
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When Kevin Smith’s low budget black-and-white debut comedy Clerks was released in 1994, a generation of would-be filmmakers and pop culture fans raised their heads upwards to the sky and shouted hallelujah!
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Thelma & Louise made quite a splash with female audiences when it first hit big screens in 1991. Imagine… a buddy film in the style of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that featured two women on the lam!
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The U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions. As admission policies change shape in America, a documentary feature called The Five Demands is showing at festivals and recently premiere-screened at New York City’s Firehouse Cinema at DCTV.
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So many love stories by French and German film directors of the 1930s are mood pieces… mood pieces that have an air of despair. A particularly powerful example of this kind of tragic love story is the 1939 French feature There’s No Tomorrow, Sans Lendemain, by the superb filmmaker Max Ophuls. Last month Kino Lorber released a restoration of this romantic drama on Blu-ray. It also is available for streaming on Kino Now.
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As the ninth and final season of Endeavour airs on PBS stations, British detective show enthusiasts are engrossed in the details of the wind-up and, at the same time, looking around to find the next great genre entertainment.
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It is interesting to take a look at the ways in which the LGBTQIA+ lifestyles have been depicted on celluloid. Until the later years of the twentieth century, homosexual and lesbian characters often were portrayed as odd and exaggerated. The restrictions of the Hollywood Production Code made any serious study of what was referred to as “sexual perversion” prohibited in mainstream Hollywood productions.
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A good friend of mine asked me if the recent film The Whale was depressing. I said no, but I’ve been wondering why I did. Why is a film about a morbidly obese man who cannot, will not, leave his small, dreary apartment not depressing?