Lloyd Schwartz

Cinerama Brought The Power Of Peripheral Vision To The Movies

Lloyd Schwartz — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:53:00 +0000

As early as silent film, directors attempted to create widescreen images. But in the 1950s it became a commercial necessity to give the multitude of new TV watchers what they couldn't get on a small screen. So even before CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO and Panavision, there was Cinerama — a process in which three projectors threw three simultaneous images onto a gigantic curved screen.

Mozart's Starring Role In 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'

Lloyd Schwartz — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:35:00 +0000

Sunday Bloody Sunday is one of those films that lets you into the lives of believable, complicated characters. A handsome, self-centered young artist played by the actor/rock singer Murray Head is having simultaneous affairs with both an older woman (played with infinitely nuanced self-irony by Glenda Jackson) and an older man, a Jewish doctor (the touching Peter Finch), two intelligent adults who have mutual friends and even know each other slightly.

Cecilia Bartoli's New 'Mission' Unearths Baroque Gems

Lloyd Schwartz — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:52:00 +0000

I never heard of the Baroque composer Agostino Steffani until last year, when the Boston Early Music Festival presented the North American premiere of Steffani's Niobe, an opera about the mythical queen who bragged so much about her many children, the gods killed them all in revenge. One of the leading roles, Niobe's husband King Amphion, was played by the early-music superstar countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, who sang the opera's most sublime aria — a hymn to the harmony of the spheres. I couldn't wait to hear Jaroussky again, and was eager to hear more Steffani.

What Happened To 'Baby Jane?' She's Turning 50

Lloyd Schwartz — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:54:00 +0000

Baby Jane Hudson is now 50 years old — or at least the strange and brilliant movie in which she's the main character is, just released as a beautifully remastered Blu-ray. Robert Aldrich's grotesque gothic tragedy is a cross between Gypsy, with its antithetical show-biz kid sisters, and Sunset Boulevard, with its decayed Hollywood glamour.

Baby Jane is a blond, curly-haired child star, a Shirley Temple wannabe, like Baby June in Gypsy. She's self-centered and more selfish than her plain sister, Blanche, who in the 1930s becomes a queen of Hollywood melodrama.