“What is so strange about the New Hollywood renaissance of the 70s is that it took place at a time of acute crisis for the business. It was a signal of the industry’s weakness that these cracks in the veneer were not only permitted but encouraged…”
“The 70s were a tumultuous and often bleak decade for the British film industry, and this pessimism bled into its output.”
“Fifty years since its release, ‘Ashad Ka Ek Din’ holds on to its Bressonian and austere power.”
‘Messiah of Evil’ Cast: A Vague Visages guide for every main performer and character in Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s 1973 horror movie.
“In Caravaggio and Scorsese’s art, the silent actions of male and female characters speak louder than words. We don’t need to hear Holofernes scream to understand what Judith has taken.”
“In my hatred for the Bond franchise, I feel I may have done a disservice to its star. I have always had a tendency to discount Sean Connery as an exquisitely sculpted statue, capable of filling out a tuxedo very nicely but little else.”
“For those suffering from the same dissatisfactions depicted in ‘Touki Bouki’ and ‘Taipei Story’ — be they based on economics, vocation, familial and romantic relations or a broad national uncertainty — hope may be all there is. And that, at least, is something.”
“Though the polizieschi may seem far away from the quiet nobility of the Neorealist films, with all their sober-minded social critique, they are bound together by the privileging of the real world.”
“With ‘Serpico,’ Lumet becomes a defining chronicler of American institutional corruption, most obviously within the justice system.”
“‘Don’t Look Now’ stands as one of the best iterations of the giallo film. It takes the best elements of the commercialized Italian psycho-thriller and presents them with a Hitchcockian flair.”
“For a filmmaker usually so concerned with the social causes of injustice, ‘The Offence’ is remarkably focused on the troubled psychology of its central character.”
“Faced with the death of its utopian hopes, the remnants of America’s counterculture split into two tendencies: the pastoral and the criminal. Its despondency was turned inwards and outwards; one side sought to build alternative structures in line with a higher authority, while the other strove to rearrange the wreckage of the existing order.”
“The cowboy is an emissary of civilisation, enduring all the hardships the elements can throw at him to create a space in which civilised values can flourish unhindered. The symbolism of the cowboy is so potent that it continues to be invoked for political gain.”
“With his concern for the outsider, and his reorienting of the West’s perception in the American mind, Peckinpah helped to birth the Acid Western.”
“Some of Avildsen’s men turn to violence. Some of them turn to crime. Some of them turn inward. All of them know that somehow, some way, they must turn. They cannot survive, let alone win, without surrendering some part of themselves.”
“Just like his protagonists, D’Antoni refused to play by the rules, and he got results.”
Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: A Column Devoted to the Streaming Platform FilmStruck
“The cumulative effect of ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ is one of openness and warmth.”
“With ‘Raging Bull’ and ‘The Aviator,’ Martin Scorsese perfects a configuration of the biopic as self-recognized fiction.”
A Justine A. Smith Series on Montreal’s Cinémathèque Québécoise
