Whether by accident or instinct, Carnival of Souls captures a sense of alienation. And the film itself, fiercely independent, with a singular vision, experienced a similar outcome as its protagonist. Read More
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Never have I encountered a more fascinating case of self-indulgence than the diptych of Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky, two films identical in plot but divergent in story, one chilly and distant and the other seeming to have been shot from inside the most passionate depths of the director’s soul. Read More
The great feat of Gangs of New York is to set itself against familiar versions of American mythology by making American history alien, and, therefore, opening up new perspectives on it. Read More
The Fall is the product of people who throw themselves into the creation of fictions that reflect their own lives, even if those reflections are unintentional, even if each person is really trying to forget about the kind of pain that feels like it will last forever. Read More
Fuses is a labor of love, but it’s Schneemann’s labor that’s often overlooked; the film isn't solely a “diaristic indulgence"—an accusatory phrase levied by male filmmakers—but an immersive creative experience. Read More
Book Club plants itself firmly in a chaotic-good alignment chart position, full of well-meaning spirit that occasionally goes completely off the rails. Read More
The beauty of a spectacle like Riverdale is that it’s the Tom Cruise of TV, skewing wildly in quality and influence, but never once doubting itself. Read More
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Featured Essays
But I'm a Cheerleader takes a remarkably bleak and real concept—conversion therapy—and exaggerates it until it glows with a gentle absurdity. Read More
Blue Velvet's darkness and degeneracy and Oedipal weirdness serve a bigger and more beautiful story; a story about love, coming of age, redemption, hope. Read More
I avoided both Heat and Jackie Brown until 2019. I recognize that this is irrational self-sabotage. It is, in this case, especially irrational behavior given that my number-one all-time celebrity crush is mid-‘90s Robert De Niro. Read More
Paris, Texas helped me, even while, in some ways, it failed me. Read More
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Instead of taking issue with the facts of what Frank Sheeran tells us, The Irishman unravels the way he positions himself within his account. Read More
There was no shortage of enthralling female protagonists in 2019, many in films much more engaging than It Chapter Two—but Beverly Marsh is the one I keep coming back to. Read More
Whenever I put on I Think You Should Leave, its bedlam feels like a weighted blanket—a brief and soothing respite from the horrible truths of the outside world. Read More
The way we experience movies shapes the way we experience life, and to experience a movie like The Beach Bum, to ingest and absorb this much giddy existential gratitude, strikes at least this viewer as quite a blessing. Read More
Queer people, refugees, those of us displaced from the linearity of the present who love people and places long gone: we’re always time traveling. We journey between the possible and impossible by way of memory, and art emerges in the crossing. Read More
Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story has nothing but empathy, the kind I’ve been craving, for Charlie and Nicole Barber—even when it would be easy not to, and especially when they have so little for each other. Read More
From the archives
2013-2020
Danny Boyle's A Life Less Ordinary is so odd, and yet so memorable, that it feels more like a vivid dream than a cookie-cutter Hollywood love story. Read More
What all this lavish praise doesn’t explain is why, precisely, the hand-drawn aesthetic matters for the particular story being told. Read More
The Return of the King is an object lesson in satisfying endings. Each one is necessary, a coda for an important story thread; each one folds in on the others like the pages of a book. Read More
“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” -Stephen King I’ve never been all that interested in horror movies, which might seem an odd way to introduce an issue that revolves almost entirely around such films. Growing up in a devoutly religious family, I wasn’t really allowed... Read More
"The first time I watched I Smile Back, I resolved not to be like Laney, to take the film as a cautionary tale. But that was two years ago, and still I find myself circling back to the same type of mistakes I’ve always made." Read More
In late 2014, I walked into a movie theater at 9 in the morning to watch Force Majeure at a film festival in Belgium, running on a combination of jetleg and a strong Americano. The movie’s subtitles were in French only, and mon français est bon mais pas super. Still, I sat enrapt, dumbfounded and aghast. Read More
Only one movie has ever managed to recreate that uniquely Dickens magic, achieving it not so much through adaptation as through transmutation. Read More
Sleeping with Other People marries the sexual frankness of 21st-century rom-coms to the wry, literate wit of classic Nora Ephron—and the human honesty of great movies in all eras. Read More
Rick Alverson's 2012 film The Comedy is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a piece of filmmaking that critiques the very game it plays. Read More
As I watched Twin Peaks: The Return each week, I couldn’t help but recall the words of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” Read More
The fundamental ethos of Catholicism in its purest form is the animating idea of The Immigrant. Its philosophical approach transcends the specific particulars of the Church, instead acquiring an operatic, metaphorical scale. Read More
David Robert Mitchell's It Follows makes paranoid subjects of us all. Read More
How a Comedy Central docuseries hosted by an unassuming weirdo rode a tidal wave of scams straight into the pantheon of the decade’s strangest and most significant art. Read More
Sean Baker's The Florida Project is among the most memorable and powerful Disney—or, at least, Disney-adjacent—films of the 21st century. Read More
Actress and director Lee Grant reflects on her 70 year career in Hollywood. Read More
The Bright Wall/Dark Room editors share their favorite films from the past ten years. Read More
The Postmodern Mysteries of Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing Read More