Tag: film criticism
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They All Laughed (1981)
Peter Bogdanovich routinely described They All Laughed as “my favorite of my movies” and ” the happiest time of my life.” This does not necessarily imply the film is good, but in this case such a question is less important than the movie’s off-screen drama, which is so often a significant part of Bogdanovich’s oeuvre.…
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Saint Jack (1979)
After three years of sifting through the state of his career in an attempt to understand what went wrong and how, Peter Bogdanovich rediscovered the elements that contributed to his early success. Shooting quickly, on location, with little money and even less time to think, Bogdanovich and his crew crafted a marvelous and insightful movie…
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Nickelodeon (1976)
Nickelodeon represents Peter Bogdanovich’s most extreme attempt to take viewers back into the history of motion pictures, partly because it is his passion but mainly because there is nowhere further back to go. The movie focuses on the earliest years of cinema when theaters were rare, but the public were becoming increasingly interested in this…
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At Long Last Love (1975)
If Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller was, as studio executive Frank Yablans put it, a ‘bunt,’ then in his next movie, Bogdanovich, in his own words “tried to hit it over the fence.” At Long Last Love is an homage to the cheerful and engaging comedy musicals of the 1930s, often directed by Ernst Lubitsch or…
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Daisy Miller (1974)
After a buildup of confidence from three straight critical and commercial successes, Peter Bogdanovich felt capable of making a noncommercial kind of movie for his own ego or as an excuse to work with his girlfriend Cybill Shepherd or simply because he was moved by Henry James’ short story. For any one of these reasons…
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Paper Moon (1973)
Child actors are, for obvious reasons, cast for their appealing looks as well as their ability to relate not just to other children in the audience but to adults as well. The best of these, like Macauley Culkin and Jodie Foster, convey and relate the emotions of their characters to the viewer who, in turn,…
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The Last Picture Show (1971)
Before traveling to Texas to shoot The Last Picture Show, an adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel, Peter Bogdanovich edited together a documentary about one of his Hollywood heroes. The documentary Directed by John Ford, compiled of various interviews Bogdanovich conducted with Ford and his acting troupe and narrated by Orson Welles, premiered a few weeks…
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Targets (1968)
Few movie directors show as much passion, intelligence and joy for their work and the history of the artform as Peter Bogdanovich, whose death earlier this year marked the end of one of the last connections to Hollywood’s Golden Age. Despite not being a filmmaker of that era, Bogdanovich was an encyclopedic source of knowledge…
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Todd Field
Rare is the movie director able to define his work within a small output. Rarer still is one capable of doing so in his first feature. In the case of Todd Field, a journeyman actor in the late 1980s and 1990s who got his directorial break with 2001’s In the Bedroom, it was at the…