Losing Ground is an heirloom for Black women, proof that we’ve always craved three-dimensional characters and sophisticated storytelling to relate to. Read More
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I so badly want what Ursula Le Guin once called for—stories that allow for the discernment of other ways of being, and which imagine grounds for hope. Read More
Ad Astra is a film deeply attuned to a heritage among the stars. Read More
I have watched The Memory of Justice dozens of times, devoting countless hours to taking notes and rewinding key moments and sleeping and dreaming and eating and waking, all while inundated—saturated, really—by my own memories of justice. Read More
If Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover is Brechtian, then The Pillow Book is a painting by Rothko, dependent on its many layers to communicate the meaning of its abstract imagery. Read More
I don’t know if, as a young actor from Boston, Matt Damon struggled with his identity. But I know the roles he took helped me find mine. Read More
Almost Famous is both a criticism of and a love letter to an industry where people are pretending to be something they’re not, trying to escape reality and searching for something real, running away from some small version of themselves. Read More
It’s only through confronting the reality of death that the four girls at the heart of this story are able to move forward from childhood to adulthood. Read More
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Featured Essays
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
If anything, Charade is a screwball thriller—and surely the best movie that Howard Hawks never made. Read More
Punch-Drunk Love—Paul Thomas Anderson’s fourth film, released when he was just 32 years old—puts you on uncertain footing from the very first frame. Read More
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The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a love letter to its city. Read More
Lynn Shelton’s camera in Humpday is a scalpel, opening the flesh of male-on-male anxiety with precision and nuance. Read More
Part of what makes Jesse and Céline’s connection so electric is the difference between being heard and being understood. When you feel understood, it feels like the first and most important time you’ve told the story. You feel like you’re alone in the world together. Read More
Bill Forsyth’s 1983 masterpiece Local Hero is perhaps the greatest film ever made about attuning to the frequency of a place, of someone fitting in when and where they least expected. Read More
It is the first day of summer 1962 in Paris, and it is a beautiful day, and for Cléo, everything is falling apart. Read More
Anyone who has ever enjoyed (or endured) a long weekend with friends will recognize the melody of A Bigger Splash. Read More
From the archives
2013-2020
Championed by the likes of contemporaries Luis Buñuel and Jerry Garcia, and later fully restored with the help of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, The Saragossa Manuscript has a hallowed space in Polish film history. Read More
Much of the exhilarating appeal of Artemis Shaw’s short, Aquaculture, lies in its assured harnessing of uncanny dissonances. Read More
Critics and fans have accurately described Hustlers as a bedazzled Recession-era period piece. But the movie is equally specific to our times, the first in Hollywood history to produce movie after movie about ordinary(ish) women doing crimes. Read More
Add a little eggnog to that rum. Settle in to your corner of the couch. Turn on the flatscreen. Refer to this guide to made-for-television holiday films. Read More
Sharp Objects is a slow-burning gothic horror about rage and shame and grief, one that explores—in meticulous, at times uncomfortable detail—what it feels like to live in both the midst and the aftermath of trauma. Read More
Anyone who has ever enjoyed (or endured) a long weekend with friends will recognize the melody of A Bigger Splash. Read More
As adults, most of us revisit these movies no longer as part of the horror genre, but instead as a nostalgic indulgence; as the last group of teenagers who came of age by VHS, the ‘90s teen horror cycle resurrected by Scream symbolizes our collective coming-of-age experience. Read More
Bill Forsyth’s 1983 masterpiece Local Hero is perhaps the greatest film ever made about attuning to the frequency of a place, of someone fitting in when and where they least expected. Read More
Part of what makes Jesse and Céline’s connection so electric is the difference between being heard and being understood. When you feel understood, it feels like the first and most important time you’ve told the story. You feel like you’re alone in the world together. Read More
“Deep listening” to Malick is valuable, but only so much in that it reminds us that artists are just humans doing their best to be in the world with other humans. Read More
It’s brilliant, on a meta level, to let Molly's Game falter for the same reasons Molly does. Read More
The Band’s Visit lets us know, right from the start, that what happens here may be small and quiet, but it matters. It may not seem like it on the surface. It won't change the world. It may not even change the lives of the characters within it. But, even so, it matters. Read More
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a love letter to its city. Read More
I felt drawn to Stand by Me in a way I had never been drawn to a movie before, longing each day to reimmerse myself in this soft-focused sun-dappled boy’s idyll. But still I wonder: what parts of me did this movie speak to? Read More
On Judy Berlin (1999) and Madeline Kahn's best, most nuanced, and final performance. Read More
Lynn Shelton’s camera in Humpday is a scalpel, opening the flesh of male-on-male anxiety with precision and nuance. Read More
It is the first day of summer 1962 in Paris, and it is a beautiful day, and for Cléo, everything is falling apart. Read More