In John Carpenter’s 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s haunted-car novel Christine, the road to hell is paved not with good intentions, but with time.
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In John Carpenter’s 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s haunted-car novel Christine, the road to hell is paved not with good intentions, but with time.
The story of Sandi Tan's Shirkers is one of a search for lost time.
Taken as a body of work, the Before trilogy asks us to consider the tension between its fantasy and naturalism, and the extent of our own ability to exert similar control over a lonely world that ushers us through life without concern for whether we’ve found any meaning in it.
In its fragments, its gradations and flirtations with the experimental ambience it’s quote-unquote about, Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground renders not a history of a band or even a moment but an alternative lens to re-collect (literally, re-touch) history.
Removed from the impossible tangle of time travel, Donnie Darko is really just a mood.
Technically, Olivier Assayas' new Irma Vep is a remake about a remake of a film about a remake of Louis Feuillade’s epic 1915-16 silent serial, Les Vampires. Heartbreakingly, it’s about the consequences of trying to transcend reality by using filmmaking as a vehicle to touch the light.
In their myriad crime stories, the Coens have tended to take a fatalistic perspective. And then there is the strange case of Raising Arizona's H.I. McDunnough.
This month, we're waxing ecstatic about the humor and humanism at the heart of Elaine May's Ishtar. We match May’s compassion for the brashly stupid Chuck and Lyle (Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, respectively) with special guest Frank Falisi, who lays out his theory that Ishtar is actually a high musical à la Vincente Minnelli.
This is Withnail and I: Hilarious, tragic, less a cohesive narrative film and more a series of rowdy and ruddy vignettes—like stumbled stops along a pub crawl—designed to make one laugh until crying, and cry until laughing, in equal, sorrowful, comical measure.
Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark bites into the myth of American individualism and exceptionalism in Western movies by throwing vampires into the mix.
Pedro Almodóvar’s Law of Desire repurposes the classic melodrama to tell a series of suppressed narratives with the visual and sentimental poetry they merit.
Innerspace is bodily—hyper-bodily, even—and in the way it upends expectations surrounding size, it suggests similar chutes and ladders for emotion, identity, for existence.
Featured Essays
from the archives 2013 - 2022
On Fantastic Mr. Fox and the contradictory, complementary visions of Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl.
Every shot in Columbus exudes an intentionality which is controlled but not controlling, each scene an austere but life-filled canvas.
On the unbearable, beautiful messiness of a single line from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
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.
On The Truman Show, Jake Paul, and the increasingly blurred lines between the performed and private self.
No one really changes. But, Broadcast News asks, isn’t that kind of beautiful?
No book or film is perfect, far from it, but Maurice gets close. It grasps for an ideal, and often, that pursuit is just as worthy.
In their myriad crime stories, the Coens have tended to take a fatalistic perspective. And then there is the strange case of Raising Arizona's H.I. McDunnough.
David Cronenberg's Videodrome is a contradictorily compact cinematic expanse of carnality and carnage.
While some would argue that Prince of Darkness fails thematically, narratively, and structurally when compared to other John Carpenter movies, I take pleasure in the film’s unruly appearances.
Whether because of repeat viewings of The Brave Little Toaster, or my own wild imagination, as a kid, I deeply believed (and feared) that my belongings were alive.
Spring Breakers can still be enjoyed as a pure hallucinatory trip, devoid of any real-world relevance. But looks are deceiving, even limiting.
This month on the show we’re talking one-on-one about Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation through the lenses of surveillance and seclusion, Gene Hackman and Walter Murch, Catholic guilt and cool jazz.
Innerspace is bodily—hyper-bodily, even—and in the way it upends expectations surrounding size, it suggests similar chutes and ladders for emotion, identity, for existence.
Pedro Almodóvar’s Law of Desire repurposes the classic melodrama to tell a series of suppressed narratives with the visual and sentimental poetry they merit.
Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark bites into the myth of American individualism and exceptionalism in Western movies by throwing vampires into the mix.
It’s a dark November night, and Colton Underwood has finally escaped The Bachelor. Bachelor Nation would never be the same.
