Botchmen What are the scripts like for the parodies? I get a very structured script. Often the original scripts have about 25 percent more panels than what shows up in the final parody. The editors trim them before they get to me, and what the artist gets is a full layout with the word boxes and the dialogue already in place. Do you always have to see the movie before you draw it?...
The Black Cannon Incident Why does everyone ignore Huang? Because he’s a comedian. The Fifth Generation made movies about how crappy it was to be a woman in China (Raise the Red Lantern), how dismal it was to be Tibetan in China (The Horse Thief), and how awful it was to be gay in China (Farewell My Concubine), but Huang made movies about missing marriage certificates (The Marriage Certificate), androids that attend boring meetings on behalf of party functionaries (Dislocation), and office politics (Back to Back, Face to Face)....
The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) In the beginning, there was light. Steven Spielberg’s earliest memory, he has said, is of the brilliant red glow of the Torah ark at a synagogue his parents took him to when he was just six months old. The Fabelmans, Spielberg’s new film à clef, also begins with light, though not of faith. In the film’s dazzle of opening scenes, the menorah comes later; first, it’s the beam of the projector that irrevocably sears the saucer eyes of 6-year-old Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord), Spielberg’s screen surrogate....
Nearly all of the material in Cameraperson, which marks Johnson’s debut as a director, was shot in the course of making other films—more than two dozen of them, including CITIZENFOUR, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Oath, and Two Towns of Jasper. But the more you watch, the more you can feel her constant presence, even when her hand isn’t reaching into frame to de-streak a windshield. A guiding intelligence links the movie’s images, and a fierce compassion, a trait more easily pondered when it’s not swept away on the tide of an overarching narrative....
“I’m not the bloody Queen,” Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison scolds her abashed male driver for addressing her as “Ma’am” instead of her preferred “Guv.” Tennison may not play royalty in the hit British television crime series Prime Suspect, though she does rule there as a queen bee. But over a long career on stage and screens large and small, Helen Mirren, who plays the spiky policewoman, has enacted a raft of bloody Queens, one of whom won her a richly deserved Oscar and swelled her already solid cachet with royalty-loving American audiences....
—The Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, Mason & Dixon It’s easy to feel cowed into submission by the sheer bigness of Paul Thomas Anderson’s three most recent features: dense, crowded, immaculately shot and composed, incident-heavy movies in which setpieces often seem to be competing with one another for attention and space. All three, despite their vast differences in texture and tone, present double portraits of troubled men set during a particularly tumultuous time and place in American history....
An Autumn Afternoon For years the Japanese had considered Yasujiro Ozu “too Japanese” to be appreciated by the West. Kurosawa and then Mizoguchi were the directors promoted in the West. Donald Richie and Joseph Anderson’s book on Japanese film, originally published in 1959, was the first that most Western film scholars had heard of Ozu. As a result Ozu’s films were not shown in foreign film festivals, museum programs, or repertory theaters....
The Kingdom Exodus (Lars von Trier, 2023) For all his insolence and mischief-making, Lars von Trier rarely seems to be having much fun—and when he does, we’re usually left choking on the lulz. The exquisitely sardonic Dogville (2003) is a hoot until it snarls with rancor and disgust. The conceptual Jackass-ism of The Idiots (1998) is predicated on a mocking of disability so flagrant that it rises (sinks?) to a level of baroque absurdism that would get von Trier extremely canceled were it released today....
Rust & Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012) In a 2012 interview about Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone, the interviewer observed of Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts that his character’s brutality was “learned behavior,” words more appropriate for a social studies class than an acting performance. Schoenaerts’ reply was illuminating: “I wanted to make him simple and sincere, and very instinctive and intuitive. Everything he does should feel like a reflex. Being tender is a reflex....
The first thing I thought of when I heard about Prince’s death was “Sometimes It Snows in April.” The song is one of my favorites, a ballad about a friend who died far too young, recorded on April 21, 1985, exactly 31 years before Prince himself died. When I started listening to Prince, the song realigned my whole perspective of him. He was clearly capable of great beauty, but I didn’t realize he could write something so moving, something that spoke with such depth....
Two male arms protrude, up to the elbows, from the exterior windows of adjoining prison cells. One hand tries to swing a bouquet of flowers to the other, though it keeps eluding the second man’s grasp. As the history of gay love onscreen is largely one of thwarted or obscured desire, this image, among the very first in Jean Genet’s sui generis Un chant d’amour, contains an immense, representative power....
Rock Hudson in All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) In July 1985, it was disclosed in the French press that 59-year-old American movie and TV star Rock Hudson had gone to Paris for AIDS treatment. This was the first time the actor’s diagnosis had been revealed in print, and the article served as a tacit confirmation for a rumor that had persisted for well over a decade: Rock Hudson was gay....
Images from Six Degrees of Separation (Fred Schepisi, 1993) To get the overdiscussed out of the way: Fred Schepisi’s film version of John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation features one of cinema’s most laughably evasive gay kisses. As has been widely reported and mocked, Will Smith, fresh off The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and protective of his burgeoning stardom, refused to lock lips with co-star Anthony Michael Hall during a crucial scene....
