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1 month ago | 
brightwalldarkroom.com | Frank Falisi
In Freehold, New Jersey, movies were the things that played at the local Loews. A multiplex childhood means memories by mass culture: the first movie I ever saw was The Lion King (1994). I remember its shapes most, behemoth blobs and lion-like impressions. The songs were louder than anything I’d ever heard. My first PG-13 movie was Small Soldiers (1998). I drank a caffeinated soda as big as my face and stayed awake all night. I thought I’d never sleep again.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
brightwalldarkroom.com | Frank Falisi
A house, like a burial, starts with a hole. You dig until there’s room enough for the body that the earth will hold. And then you fill it up, variably with the living and the dead. The first onscreen death to occur in Here—Robert Zemeckis’s film adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel by the same name—happens less than three minutes into the runtime. Roughly 65 million years before the present day, a dinosaur pushes against the egg that encases it.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
thefilmstage.com | Frank Falisi
Hours before I place my trust in a rush-hour F train departing from Herald Square just 19 days before Christmas, I am speaking with scholar and filmmaker Jerry Carlson about David Bordwell and Orson Welles’ Filming Othello. Nominally a chronicle of Welles’ time adapting Shakespeare’s play, the documentary’s stream of inconsistencies and outright fibs linger with the late critic.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
brightwalldarkroom.com | Frank Falisi
Say “screwball.” Do you linger on the first part, slink on its slip and milk the sibilance? Screw is: the thing that turns in order to adhere, a colloquial cheat or swindle, an exclamation of disavowal, saying sex without saying sex. Say it again. And that second word? A ball, a blast, a bounce, a dance. Again, it’s the lovemaker’s euphemism! “You sure love to ball.”A certain liberation emerges in unloosening the figurative, in literalizing the poetry of it.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
inreviewonline.com | Frank Falisi |Luke Gorham
Credit: Paramount Pictures/American Zoetrope Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
brightwalldarkroom.com | Frank Falisi
The opening three and a half minutes of Jungle Fever (1991) provide a glimpse into the kinetic and plastic possibilities of form that would come to define Spike Lee’s filmmaking over the next (still in-progress, blessedly) 33 years. The sequence begins in memorial, lingering on a still image of Yusuf Hawkins, the 16-year-old Black boy killed by a white mob in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The image fades to black, briefly, before the viewer is buffeted by a gummy, synthy Stevie Wonder line of melody.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
inreviewonline.com | Frank Falisi |Luke Gorham
The release of a new Tim Burton film prompts any number of critical referendums on the filmmaker’s work and legacy. For critics of a certain age (including this one), Burton’s forthrightness of vision — sometimes manifesting as a lazy obviousness of tendency — was instructive for learning to watch a film for its maker’s hand, on its maker’s terms. Is he the first auteur many viewers can obviously point to, charting fussy tactility and Gothic panache alike?
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
inreviewonline.com | Frank Falisi |Luke Gorham
To its considerable credit, Stephen Soucy’s recent documentary, Merchant Ivory (2024), resists the tendency toward hagiography. It’s an understandably tempting opportunity, composed as the film is largely of conversations with James Ivory, now in his 96th year and still working, talking, and thinking carefully about the world we live in and the ones that got us here.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
inreviewonline.com | Frank Falisi |Luke Gorham
At a moment of especially heightened anxiety occurring — when else? — during Shabbat dinner, one of Between the Temples’ wiser characters offers a parable about toothpaste, its tube, and the impossibility of getting the fated gel back inside once it’s been squeezed out.
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Aug 18, 2024 | 
inreviewonline.com | Frank Falisi |Luke Gorham
First, the camera presents a world for the song to take place in. A spike of sky above a statue that reaches upward forever, a monkey walking nowhere. Then a cut to an excitable audience, the object of their devotion unknown, the light on their faces purple-cool, as if reflected from a screen. This the world of “REALiTi,” abrupt cuts and all, and once the vocals begin, the camera alights on the singer. She lip syncs, zhuzhs her hair, looks up, looks away.
