“The persona, the artist, the maestro, the ringmaster — one can’t help but bask in the direct, subjective joy and the elegiac reverence for cinema itself.”
“It is Karina who embodied the freedom, fascination and the unpredictability that would define the French New Wave. It is Karina who made so many fall in love — with her and with cinema as an extraordinary, exultant medium.”
“Corbucci’s cynical vision is fashioned from a style that is brutal and spontaneous, with a manic camera, more visceral violence and an unabated crudity.”
“Rossellini astonishingly blends the good and the bad into an imperfect merging of society in all its multiplicity of guises. Death, desolation and violence are as pervasive in the film as love and empathy.”
“Whether they intended to or not, the ‘Gimme Shelter’ filmmakers had tapped into and exposed a diabolical soul and a deep-seated hostility. The sun that had fleetingly shone so brightly was starting to set.”
“Whenever they exist, wherever they roam, with this continuation of personality and principle, it is often as if Peckinpah’s characters were simply picked up from the past and dropped into another time, a time where the Western — and western — spirit remains.”
“Cagney’s sadistic lead in ‘White Heat,’ a searing 1949 crime drama from director Raoul Walsh, is something well past the norms of a conventional male protagonist — or antagonist, for that matter.”
“Confronted, challenged and upended throughout the course of Michael Cimino’s ‘The Deer Hunter,’ conventional notions of masculinity are routinely conditional to the film’s dominant shifts in setting and tone.”
“It is a vigorous and violent film, epic and enchanting, probing and revelatory and voluminous in its ornate, cohesive and exhaustive production design…”
“As much as ‘Hoop Dreams’ concerns the sports-centric plight of William and Arthur, it is perhaps even more significantly an illustrative case study of what perpetually imperils men (and women) of a certain social, economic and racial constitution.”
