Drive My Car suggests that art itself is a vehicle for both communication and self-exploration. It can communicate what cannot be said out loud, if we are willing to listen, and can also be the vessel through which we better understand who we are.
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Whatever Bo Burnham’s Inside is—a stand-up routine, a television special, a piece of musical theater, a music album, a documentary, a cinematic selfie, a confession—I think it’s cinema.
Licorice Pizza offered me more of the joys of cinema than anything has in years, but I regret its perpetuation of an erasure ironically similar to that practiced in the era Anderson satirizes.
The magic trick of Joanna Hogg’s film is not so much that The Souvenir Part II is funnier or stranger or better than its predecessor: it’s that Part II redefines both films as another form of memoir entirely.
Rewatching Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story will become my winter balm and consolation. I will dream of love for the first time in a long time, and I will weep thinking of how I am ready for it once again.
The very best films and first watches in 2021 from the BW/DR editorial staff.
The great literary twist of Midnight Mass is that, after all that, their salvation is also their sin, and it is entirely earthly, entirely finite.
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Featured Essays
Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, unlike most films, is not an escape.
Two years into my struggle with mental illness, I discovered The Virgin Suicides. While a team of psychiatrists struggled to diagnose me, and my school struggled to teach me, a movie was helping me make sense of my mind.
On the one hand, everything we do may be meaningless. Oblivion may be the only truth. But on the other, maybe it’s exactly this ultimate despair that makes our all our everyday actions essential.
“In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.” —Wallace Stevens, “Of the...
More than any other Alien movie, David Fincher's Alien 3 is aware of Ripley’s existence as a woman, and the unique and universal horrors that come with the territory of inhabiting a woman’s body.
Orson Welles' Othello is a fever dream in both production and result—the former a nightmare, the latter bliss.
Like most of the serial killer thrillers it’s said to vanguard, Manhunter smacks of gender. Our hardened hero is not just softened by his traumatic past, but broken by it, his manhood warped by the terror that now governs him.
My unpopular opinion is that Wild Mountain Thyme is a transcendent work of art. Not from any objective standpoint, but rather from that of one particular head and heart: my own.
Was it always supposed to get this bad? Can it possibly get any worse? These questions are never spoken in Sidney Lumet’s masterfully taut Fail Safe, but endlessly they bounce around the margins.
Nationality is the theme that bookends The English Patient, looping one timeline back into the other and overriding Almásy and Katharine’s affair as the ultimate question of the narrative.
Don’t Look Now is a story about vision. The things we see, the things we don’t, the things we see without using our eyes.
My unpopular opinion is that Wild Mountain Thyme is a transcendent work of art. Not from any objective standpoint, but rather from that of one particular head and heart: my own.
Part-essay, part-collage, part-apocalyptic tone poem, Bitter Lake captures better than any other film, both factually and aesthetically, the chaotic quagmire of the Afghanistan war, while situating it within a historical context that gives some clarity to the madness.
Nationality is the theme that bookends The English Patient, looping one timeline back into the other and overriding Almásy and Katharine’s affair as the ultimate question of the narrative.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the franchise’s definitive encapsulation of its own generational impact, and a bridge between generations of moviegoers.
Orson Welles' Othello is a fever dream in both production and result—the former a nightmare, the latter bliss.
Was it always supposed to get this bad? Can it possibly get any worse? These questions are never spoken in Sidney Lumet’s masterfully taut Fail Safe, but endlessly they bounce around the margins.
Like most of the serial killer thrillers it’s said to vanguard, Manhunter smacks of gender. Our hardened hero is not just softened by his traumatic past, but broken by it, his manhood warped by the terror that now governs him.
Andrew Ahn’s Driveways is a difficult film to pin down, precisely because there’s so little in it to process, demystify, or explain. There are no set pieces or battle scenes, no dramatic plot twists or betrayals. Instead, it captures life in its simplest, most ordinary forms.
Don’t Look Now is a story about vision. The things we see, the things we don’t, the things we see without using our eyes.
On the unbearable, beautiful messiness of a single line from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is a self-fulfilling prophecy that undoes itself in the telling, an ouroboros regurgitating its own tail rather than eating it.
Watching Jauja so far from home, I felt the protagonist and I asking the same questions about fatherhood, sharing the same anxieties about raising a child in ways that we, ourselves, were not raised.
