A fuller accounting of the creative contributions of women to the film industry in its early decades is still fighting for a place in mainstream awareness. The documentary Be Natural is a valuable battering ram in that fight.
Betsy Sherman
Film Feature: Best Movies (With Some Disappointments) of 2019
Our demanding critics choose the best (and the most disappointing) films of the year.
Film Review: At BUFF-o-WEEN — The “Blood & Flesh” of Al Adamson, King of the Shoestring Budget
“They were pieces of shit when we shot ‘em, but later on they became relics.”
Coming Attractions: June 30 through July 15 — What Will Light Your Fire
Arts Fuse critics select the best in film, dance, visual art, theater, music, and author events for the coming weeks.
Film Review: “Her Smell” — Fiddling with Our Viscera
Her Smell is funny-terrifying, alluring-repulsive, moving-disturbing, era-capturing and timeless.
Film Review: “Damaged Lives” — Improbably Poetic
Even an imperfect work-for-hire like Damaged Lives can show the touch of an artist.
Film Review: At Harvard Film Archive –“The Complete Luchino Visconti”
Luchino Visconti made theatrically tinged movies driven by music, indebted to painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature—he accomplished, dare I say, a fusion of the arts.
Arts Appreciation — Jerry Lewis, A Comic Actor of Glorious Contradictions
We’re losing Lewis’s generation of Depression-bred, Borscht Belt-weaned entertainers with their un-ironic neediness for laughs and their canny way of getting them.
Film Review: “Landline” — A Compelling Comedy-With-Drama
Landline is a textured, often funny and subtly acted portrait of a family experiencing rumblings set off by sexual affairs.
Film Review: “Democracy Through the Looking Glass” — Take a Good Look
The interviewees sound warnings about how we have self-sorted, online and in the real world, into echo-chamber communities of like-minded people.