We’re huge fans of the Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself, but now we could be getting a movie based on the life of a critic who inspired even him. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is a documentary based on the life of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, and you can help …
Part I. 1971 was an incredibly violent year for movies. That year saw, among others, Tom Laughlin’s Billy Jack, with its half-Indian hero karate-chopping rednecks; William Friedkin’s The French Connection, its dogged cops stymied by well-heeled drug runners; Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, banned for the copycat crimes it reportedly inspired; and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw …
Part I. In 1963, Film Quarterly published an essay entitled “Circles and Squares.” It addressed the French auteur theory, introduced to America by The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris. Auteurism holds that a film’s primary creator is its director; Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory” further distinguished auteurs as filmmakers with distinct, recurring styles. Challenging him …
Some of you (hopefully) may have noticed my recent profile on the late, great Robert Mitchum. In the course of researching the piece, I came across the fun tidbit that Mitchum had been a favorite of film critic Roger Ebert. The mind rarely works in linear fashion, and I suspect mine may even be more …