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‘Is This a Love Story?’: Naoko Yamada Rewrites the Love Confession

One of Naoko Yamada’s most striking and unique traits as a director is her ability to convey the emotional intensity of a love confession, not through bombast or theatrical showiness, but through the startling vulnerability of a genuinely honest conversation. Read More

Issue 83: Secrets and Confessions

May 2020

The Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993) | Art by Brianna Ashby

I’m Enduring It

Veronica Fitzpatrick·

Issue 83: Secrets and Confessions

What we commend as “real” in life as in film, and perhaps in Scorsese’s films in particular, we might call gritty, dark, or uncompromising; The Age of Innocence proposes otherwise. What could be more violent than a life sculpted by compromise? Read More

The Namesake (2006) | Fox Searchlight Pictures

We All Came Out of Gogol’s Overcoat

Roxana Hadadi·

Issue 83: Secrets and Confessions

On the uneasy duality of Identity in Mira Nair's The Namesake. Read More

Michael Haneke’s Secrets

Molly Cooper·

Issue 83: Secrets and Confessions

Michael Haneke’s films emphatically resist interpretation, laying out strange and sometimes bewildering scenarios that remain unresolved even as the end credits roll. Read More

Deliver Me from L.L. Bean

Candace Jane Opper·

Issue 83: Secrets and Confessions

Like many American landscapes, Connecticut’s pop culture identity is so omnipresent that it’s sometimes difficult to tell where the stereotypes end and the real place begins. Read More

Please, Spare Me Your Secrets

Lara Ryd·

Issue 83: Secrets and Confessions

Rather than convincing us that we’re better off keeping our secrets, Le Jeu demonstrates what happens when our secrets remain stagnant—instead of providing relief, they suffocate us. Read More

Life Is Short: Stunt It

Frank Falisi·

Issue 83: Secrets and Confessions

Hot Rod is an activist text. It is not escapist; its weirdness calls attention to the flaws of our world instead of distracting from them. Read More

Featured Essays

Religious Cinema for Non-Believers: Martin Scorsese’s Silence

Joel Mayward·

Issue 70: Going Long

Martin Scorsese's Silence is about entering into the cloud of unknowing, the dark night of the soul, listening to the silence of God and waiting eternally for a response. Read More

Watching the Wheels: Finding Meaning and Purpose in Paterson

Ethan Warren·

Issue 63: Work

In the world of Jarmusch’s film, the purpose of work lies not in external achievement, but in the personal satisfaction of doing. Read More

A New Leaf (1971) | poster by Tony Stella

Blind Date

Veronica Fitzpatrick·

Issue 75: Elaine May

For all of A New Leaf's atonal humor and surrealism, Elaine May still manages to depict marriage in a bleakly true light: as a continual, if cordial, blind date. Read More

Sticks & Stones

Andrew Root·

Issue 43: Best of 2016

Arrival purports to have a circular structure itself, through the use of flashbacks and forwards, but subsequent viewings reveal it to be linear by way of a palindrome. Read More

Something True and Right and Dramatic: Boogie Nights as Religious Experience

Britton Andrews·

Issue 60: That's Entertainment!

Like any good magic trick, Boogie Nights disrupted my understanding of the world. Read More

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Issue 82: Literary Adaptations Redux

April 2020

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | art by Tony Stella

The Beauty Filter

Fran Hoepfner·

Issue 82: Literary Adaptations Redux

Maggie Smith won the first of her two Academy Awards for her titular role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and it’s easy to see why the girls in the film worship her—I worship her, too. Read More

You Have Promised Me A Thing Not Possible

Sarah Shachat·

Issue 82: Literary Adaptations Redux

What the film version of The Dead sacrifices in character subjectivity, it makes up for in a kind of living, overhanging sense of the passage of time, its inevitability, and our inability to control it. Read More

Zazie dans le Métro | art by Tony Stella

Throw Dada From The Train: Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Métro, 60 Years Later

Ashley Naftule·

Issue 82: Literary Adaptations Redux

Louis Malle's Zazie dans le Métro is a full-color, live-action cartoon—an hour-and-a-half blast of Dadaist lunacy that feels like it’s being transmitted from an entirely different universe. Read More

Fantastic Mr. Fox | art by Brianna Ashby

Quote Unquote Fantastic

Ethan Warren·

Issue 82: Literary Adaptations Redux

On Fantastic Mr. Fox and the contradictory, complementary visions of Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl. Read More

Burning (2018) | Well Go USA Entertainment

Watching the World Burn

Calvin McMillin·

Issue 82: Literary Adaptations Redux

Burning hinges on the disappearance of a young woman, which suggests that the film should be classified as a mystery, the genre that most actively encourages viewers to interpret the evidence placed in front of them. But the ambiguity of human relationships—of what we see, of what we don’t see, and of what we choose to ignore—is the film’s biggest mystery. Read More

Saoirse Ronan in Little Women (2019) | Sony Pictures

That’s So Metatextual: Jo, Louisa, and Layers in Little Women

Grace Wehniainen·

Issue 82: Literary Adaptations Redux

The beauty of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women lies in the imperfection, the gap between a writer’s life and her story, old and new, girlhood and womanhood and the messy road between. Read More

From the archives

2013-2020

Me in Pink

Courtney Duckworth·

Issue 28: Teenagers

If Pretty in Pink were the imagined fable of those high school days, the moral would perhaps be: Someday someone will appreciate you for who you are. Read More

An Interview with Kevin McCallister on the Anniversary of His Abandonment

Bebe Ballroom·

Issue 1: Beginnings

It is December of 2012, the 22nd anniversary of “The Home Alone Kid.” Read More

The Heartbreak Kid (1972) | poster art by Tony Stella

Still Heartbroken After All These Years

Ethan Warren·

Issue 75: Elaine May

The Heartbreak Kid as Elaine May’s Master Class. Read More

Annihilation (2018) | Paramount Pictures

When Our Bodies Are Not Our Homes

Kelsey Ford·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

In both The Haunting of Hill House and Annihilation, landscapes are the loci of the characters’ malfunctions. Hill House and Area X, respectively, give their characters a place to focus their energy—and then use that energy, that sense of comfort, to undo them. Read More

Physical Comedy in Modern Times

Greg Cwik·

Issue 23: Funny Bones

Like Joseph Cotten standing over Harry Lime’s secretly empty grave, moviegoers have been mourning the false death of physical comedy for almost 70 years. In his seminal essay on Comedy’s Golden Age, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” published in Life in 1949, James Agee laments the usurpation of comedic artistry by the talkies. Meaning well,... Read More

This is a Love Story: When Women Look Back at Us

Zosha Millman·

Issue 81: Sacrifice

Sometimes, the only thing a woman can do is let herself be seen on her own terms. Read More

All Quiet on the Western Front | art by Tony Stella

War Is War Is War

Morgan Leigh Davies·

Issue 81: Sacrifice

All Quiet on the Western Front is both thoroughly of its own historical moment and a timeless argument against war and nationalism. Read More

Taylor Swift in 'Miss Americana' | Netflix

Sick and Famous

Eleanor Cummins·

Issue 81: Sacrifice

Celebrity documentaries have always fed on pain, but the way that pain is framed has changed radically in the last half-century; celebrity itself is now a disease—an affliction that curdles the mind and batters the body all while coating you in gold. Read More

She Wants to Get Inside Me: The Body and the Body Politic in Suspiria

Amelia Merrill·

Issue 81: Sacrifice

When I close my eyes and think of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, I see red; when I do the same with Luca Guadagnino’s, I see bone. Read More

The Scapegoat: The Dardenne Brothers’ The Son

Joel Mayward·

Issue 81: Sacrifice

The Dardenne brothers take our pre-understanding of revenge films and mercifully dismantle it. No graphic violence is depicted and no scapegoat is needed—the sacrifice and forgiveness are wholly internal. Read More

Surrendering the Past

Natalie Stendall·

Issue 81: Sacrifice

Many cynical “hot takes” regarding historical accuracy appear to miss something vital about cinematic storytelling as an art form: that it works by creating patterns and rhythm, by adhering to familiar story shapes and rules, and by communicating ideas through signs and symbols. Read More

Geena Davis in A League of Their Own | art by Brianna Ashby

The Hard is What Makes It Great

Emmy Potter·

Issue 81: Sacrifice

I love A League of Their Own for many reasons—its examination of sisterhood, Tom Hanks’ performance, the joy of watching famous women like Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell really play baseball—but mainly because it’s a movie where women take up significant space. Read More

It’s Just Life: John Magaro on First Cow

Fran Hoepfner·

Interviews

"It's just life. That takes a tremendous amount of bravery and Kelly has that as a filmmaker." Read More

What Do You Want?: Locating Female Desire in Good Girls

Ivana Brehas·

Issue 81: Sacrifice

Woman’s quest to locate her own desire—to separate what she really wants from what she’s been indoctrinated to want—is the conflict at the center of countless women’s stories. While they have rarely found an answer by the end, they are a step closer to it. Read More

The Last Temptation of Christ | Tony Stella

The Cross Inside Me

Thomas Zak·

Issue 81: Sacrifice

In probing the depth of Jesus’s humanity, Martin Scorsese makes the sacrifice of Christ all the more fulfilling, real, tortured, and true. Read More

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) | art by Tony Stella

I Can’t Give You Anything But Love

Travis Woods·

Issue 80: A Fine Mess

John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a masterpiece, not in spite of its messiness but rather because of it. Read More

Short Film Spotlight: Dulce

Ethan Warren·

Short Film Spotlight

There’s a type of story I’ve come to recognize as my favorite: the ones that seem in the moment to be about small, even insubstantial, personal concerns yet reveal themselves immediately upon finishing to have conveyed something like the full enormity of what it means to be alive. Read More

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