Melissa Anderson
We’ll Always Have Paris
Melissa Anderson on Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring
June 2013
SOFIA COPPOLA’S REMOTE, REPETITIVE The Bling Ring, inspired by a 2010 Vanity Fair article about a quintet of San Fernando Valley teens who broke into and robbed celebrity homes, is often as insubstantial as the reality-TV stars name-checked… READ ON
FILM
Enfant Terrible
Melissa Anderson on Jonathan Glazer’s Birth
June 2013
A FILM AGAINST FORGETTING, Jonathan Glazer’s majestic, outlandish Birth was itself nearly confined to oblivion shortly after it was released in the fall of 2004. It never received the accolades bestowed on another highly unconventional love… READ ON
FILM
X Files
Melissa Anderson on Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight
May 2013
“EVERY FILM IS A DOCUMENTARY of its actors,” Godard once said—a maxim movingly borne out in Before Midnight, the third installment in Richard Linklater’s unprecedented longitudinal study of Generation X romance. The first film in the… READ ON
FILM
Flaming Creatures
Melissa Anderson on Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra
May 2013
CAFTANS, POODLES, POPPERS, toupees, face peels, glory holes, diamonds, and furs: Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s terrific Liberace biopic, shows just what a spectacle the closet could be. Spanning 1977, the year that Liberace… READ ON
FILM
Once More, with Feeling
Melissa Anderson on Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell
May 2013
THOUGH STORIES WE TELL is Sarah Polley’s first documentary, it continues a theme explored in depth in her two features, Away from Her (2006) and Take This Waltz (2011): the pitfalls of married life and third-party complications. The conjugal… READ ON
FILM
Critical Condition
Melissa Anderson on “Booed at Cannes” at BAMcinématek
May 2013
BAMCINÉMATEK’S INGENIOUS PROGRAM “Booed at Cannes,” which kicks off a week before the year’s most prestigious cine-orgy commences in the Côte d’Azur and ends three days before it, presents fifteen films, spanning 1953 to 2004, … READ ON
FILM
Hanky Panky
Melissa Anderson on The Boys in the Band and Cruising at BAMcinématek
May 2013
WILLIAM FRIEDKIN BOOKENDED the decade that saw the release of his back-to-back box-office hits The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) with two infamous queer landmarks, each released around the time of a seismic change in gay … READ ON
FILM
Left Behind
Melissa Anderson on Last Summer Won’t Happen
April 2013
THE EPOCHAL EVENT referred to in Peter Gessner and Tom Hurwitz’s Last Summer Won’t Happen—its syntactically bizarre title both negating the past and preempting the future—is the Summer of Love of 1967, a year marked by be-ins and … READ ON
FILM
Home Schooled
Melissa Anderson on François Ozon’s In the House
April 2013
MAKING HIS BREAKTHROUGH WORKS at the tail end of the New Queer Cinema, François Ozon was once devoted to charting psychosexual extremes in movies like See the Sea (1997), Criminal Lovers (1999), and Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000). But… READ ON
FILM
the films of Jacques Demy
FILM
April 2013
“I’M TRYING TO CREATE A WORLD IN MY FILMS,” Jacques Demy once said. This demiurge (Demy-urge?) transformed humdrum provincial port towns into florid, fantastic realms. Several of his works were inspired by myths or fairy tales; even … READ ON