Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Dec 7, 2009, 7:00 am
Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant is a film entirely built around its central performance, Harvey Keitel's fearless, unfettered turn as a corrupt, unnamed New York City police lieutenant. Keitel d...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Dec 4, 2009, 6:00 am
Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage is best known for a plot device that Hitch himself regretted using, a suspense sequence that the Master of Suspense later deemed a failure in his oeuvre. Indeed, the fi...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Dec 2, 2009, 6:15 am
The eleventh installment of the Conversations has now been posted at The House Next Door. This time, Jason and I tackle David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, using the opportunity to talk about the nat...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Dec 1, 2009, 6:00 am
Shirley Clarke's Bridges-Go-Round is a four-minute minimalist examination of urban structures around New York, mainly bridges as the title indicates. Clarke assembled the film using leftover foota...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Nov 28, 2009, 1:00 pm
The Mask of Fu Manchu is, it has to be said, an utterly bizarre movie in so many ways. This quickie shocker casts Boris Karloff as the titular Fu Manchu, a sinister Chinese scientist and criminal who&...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Nov 27, 2009, 1:13 pm
Dennis Cozzalio's film quizzes are a popular diversion for film bloggers everywhere, and he's just posted his newest one over at his always-great blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Th...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Nov 24, 2009, 7:30 am
The writer Yukio Mishima seemingly lived his life with a single possibility always in mind, an impossible ideal towards which he was always working. In Paul Schrader's evocative biopic of the infl...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Nov 19, 2009, 10:15 pm
... was adapted from one of Mishima's own short stories, and it shows in this overly literary grounding. Mishima himself ... of committing in reality. It's no surprise, then, that the film ...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Nov 13, 2009, 6:10 am
Claude Chabrol has always been especially interested in the dynamics of class power, examining the nature of class with a dry, caustic wit. In La cérémonie, this examination plays out in a remote sm...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Nov 11, 2009, 9:30 am
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is, at least superficially, John Cassavetes' stab at a gangster thriller. In fact, though, the film's genre trappings are incidental to its central purpose, a c...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Nov 9, 2009, 7:00 am
Although Richard Kelly's third movie The Box has been advertised as an edgy thriller, an attempt for the director to claim some mainstream cred after the lackluster response to his messy, ambitiou...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Oct 30, 2009, 7:21 am
The tenth installment of the Conversations is here, just in time for Halloween. In this latest discussion, Jason Bellamy and I turn our attention to Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, a startling an...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Oct 20, 2009, 6:20 am
A John Grisham potboiler would seem an unlikely subject for director Robert Altman, who nevertheless made Grisham's The Gingerbread Man his own, mapping the familiar Altmanesque casual pacing and ...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Oct 13, 2009, 7:30 am
Georges Franju's Judex is an arch, playful tribute to the serials of the influential silent filmmaker Louis Feuillade. Franju shuffles through the plot of Feuillade's lengthy serial of the sam...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Oct 9, 2009, 1:40 pm
I've got a couple of updates here, for those who are interested. The first is that, as some of you may have noticed, my brief attempt to start a calendar to keep track of film blog events was quic...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Oct 7, 2009, 7:30 am
The ninth of my conversations with Jason Bellamy has now been posted at The House Next Door. This latest installment of the series is a contribution to the Pixar Week event, which is running from Octo...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Oct 5, 2009, 7:00 am
Blue, White and Perfect is the fourth film in the Michael Shayne mystery series, starring Lloyd Nolan as the hapless private detective who's always down on his luck, and who often bumbles through ...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 29, 2009, 9:30 am
Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is not just a film about a murder mystery, but a film about voyeurism, about how and why we watch other people — and by extension, how and why we watch films t...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 25, 2009, 8:00 pm
I will be taking a short break from blogging over the next week or two. I'm getting married, and will be happily busy away from the computer. There are one or two posts scheduled to go up automati...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 23, 2009, 8:30 am
When the filmmaker François Reichenbach was dying, he told his friend, the screenwriter Danièle Thompson, that he was going to be buried in his family plot in the country town of Limoges, and that a...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 21, 2009, 6:28 am
Claire Denis' Nénette and Boni is a low-key, understated family drama, blending fluidly between observational pseudo-documentary scenes of lower-class life and the characters' stylized fantas...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 17, 2009, 10:30 am
Maya Deren is a legendary figure in avant-garde cinema, a true visionary who completed just six short films in her brief life, but whose reputation has endured on the strength of this small but utterl...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 16, 2009, 8:30 am
La belle noiseuse is a late masterpiece from Jacques Rivette, a typically haunting and enigmatic study of the mystery inherent in artistic creation, and the ways in which art and life inform and bleed...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 15, 2009, 9:00 am
[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's selection is courtesy of Pat Pip...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 14, 2009, 9:20 am
Pat Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre has just posted his writeup of Lindsay Anderson's If.... for the latest installment of the Oldest Established Really Important Film Club. For those who have participa...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 11, 2009, 8:00 am
The Indomitable Leni Peickert is a loose, half-hour sequel to Alexander Kluge's second feature film, Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed. This shorter work, seemingly assembled from leftover footage...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 10, 2009, 8:37 pm
Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed was Alexander Kluge's second feature, an unusual collage film that deals with the frontiers of human possibility, with the problems of creating art that truly pus...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 6, 2009, 8:00 am
D.A. Pennebaker's seminal documentary Don't Look Back remains the startling work it was upon its release: not only a revolutionary cinema verité approach to a rock tour, but one of the most i...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 4, 2009, 6:26 am
[This is a contribution to the Robert Wise Blogathon being hosted at Octopus Cinema from September 1-7.] Mademoiselle Fifi is a curious bit of World War II propaganda, made at the tail end of the war...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 3, 2009, 7:30 am
[This is a contribution to the Robert Wise Blogathon being hosted at Octopus Cinema from September 1-7.] Robert Wise's The Set-Up is one of the great noirs, a crisp and economical B-movie, its gr...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 2, 2009, 6:30 am
As previously announced here, Jason Bellamy and I have completed the latest installment of our Conversations series at The House Next Door. This eighth conversation is a discussion of the work of Quen...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Sep 1, 2009, 8:00 am
It's an irreverent, silly, lightweight World War II comedy/thriller that plays fast and loose with historical facts, including having some fun at Hitler's expense, with a grand climax at a the...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Aug 31, 2009, 7:00 am
Jason Bellamy and I have completed the latest installment of our Conversations series at The House Next Door. In honor of the release of Inglourious Basterds, the film that seemingly everyone is talki...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Aug 30, 2009, 7:00 am
In Rock Hudson's Home Movies, filmmaker Mark Rappaport conducts a revisionist analysis of the famed Hollywood actor's cinematic career, with Hudson's films revisited with the hindsight kno...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Aug 28, 2009, 6:30 am
[This is part of a series of posts in which I explore the work of the Austrian DVD label Index DVD. This company has released a great deal of valuable European experimental cinema onto DVD, naturally ...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Aug 27, 2009, 6:30 am
No one but Howard Hawks could have made Red Line 7000. It is a truly Hawksian picture through and through, bearing the distinctive imprint of his work in every frame. Not that this means it's any ...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Aug 26, 2009, 6:15 am
Maurice Pialat's debut feature was L'enfance nue, a quiet, unassuming film about childhood confusion and isolation, following the lead of his predecessors in the French film tradition, Zero Fo...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Aug 22, 2009, 8:45 am
Alfred Hitchcock's final film is the light, enjoyably fluffy Family Plot, which balances Hitchcock's flare for suspense against the kind of airy, slightly goofy comedy that propelled his autum...
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Edward H. posted an article on Only the Cinema - Aug 21, 2009, 6:04 am
Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent is an elusive, enigmatic spy thriller, one in which all the actual spy action takes place offscreen, unseen but much talked about afterward. Rohmer, hardly known as a di...
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