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
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Clocking in at 152 minutes, Funny People is practically a Lav Diaz film in comparison to its American studio comedy brethren. Read More
Though I wouldn’t come out as a trans woman for another four years, Laurence Anyways felt like a map to the puzzle that was my body, a dysphoric labyrinth of ill-fitting limbs and inarticulate desires. Read More
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
Through the Olive Trees is about the melding of two guiding principles: the aching yearn we all have for human companionship, and the knowledge gained by peeking behind the cinematic curtain and seeing ourselves. Read More
The staying power of The Shawshank Redemption is by turns fascinating and baffling. Read More
The perfection of Jan de Bont’s Speed owes not to its exemplification of “classical” Hollywood narrative, but to the intensity of its enthusiasm for those norms. Read More
When I watch Reality Bites now, it’s like reminiscing with old friends, sharing an inside joke: Hey, we were a bunch of young idiots, but we made it out okay. Read More
Dumb and Dumber is not a dumb movie at all, but rather a smart movie about dumb people. Read More
Claire Denis' U.S. Go Home is not a film about one life; it is a little section of adolescence, ambiguous and important enough to feel like some private admission. Read More
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The dialectics of Spike Jonze's Her follow the limitations and liberties of technology and humanity. Read More
In Phantom Thread, the concession of loving is not an ending, nor a triumph—it is a turn of the screw. Read More
“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... Read More
Secretary never exploits or stereotypes BDSM for sport; never uses it as a sideshow; never markets it as a pathology to overcome. Read More
Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight is a heist story, a sexy potboiler, a noir rom-com that resurrects and perfects the lost art of cinematic sexual tension. Read More
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For all his admissions that memory is spurious and structured by lack, filmmaker Chris Marker (La Jetée, Sans Soleil) still found something beautiful in “the moss of time.” Read More
Mirai captures with astute tenderness the ways in which time can be a fickle thing, a slippery substance that escapes your grasp before you’ve even had a chance to comprehend it. Read More
With The Winter's Tale in mind, it's possible to see why there have to be two stories, with two endings, in Twin Peaks: The Return. Read More
From the archives
2013-2019
When I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark as a kid, I didn’t know a thing about tracking shots, composition, or visual framing—I only knew I wanted this film in my brain forever. Read More
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
On Bright Star and Fanny Brawne. Read More
In Chungking Express, everything is important—every can of pineapple, every dripping towel, every loop of “California Dreamin’”—mimicking that all-encompassing feeling of infatuation. These small items hold an entire story, the heartbreak and the hope and the waiting. Read More
When I watch Reality Bites now, it’s like reminiscing with old friends, sharing an inside joke: Hey, we were a bunch of young idiots, but we made it out okay. Read More
Claire Denis' U.S. Go Home is not a film about one life; it is a little section of adolescence, ambiguous and important enough to feel like some private admission. Read More
The staying power of The Shawshank Redemption is by turns fascinating and baffling. Read More
Dumb and Dumber is not a dumb movie at all, but rather a smart movie about dumb people. Read More
It’s not death and disaster and grievous harm that incite my anxiety if I consume too many consecutive episodes of ER—it’s the randomness of those things, the way the show forces me to grapple with the uncontrollability of our physical and psychic vulnerabilities, and the fact that pain is an inevitable consequence of having a human body. Read More
At its very surface, Sex and the City is replete with expressions of feeling toward time—passing too fast or too slow, comprising paralyzing pasts and unforeseeable futures. Read More
The Set-Up is a 72-minute cinematic poem. Director Robert Wise, who cut his teeth in Hollywood as an editor, strips away many of the fight-film conventions that his contemporaries used quite liberally. There is no training montage, no meteoric rise and fall, no climactic bout between the fighter and his hated rival. Read More
Mirai captures with astute tenderness the ways in which time can be a fickle thing, a slippery substance that escapes your grasp before you’ve even had a chance to comprehend it. Read More
With The Winter's Tale in mind, it's possible to see why there have to be two stories, with two endings, in Twin Peaks: The Return. Read More
Much of the exhilarating appeal of Artemis Shaw’s short, Aquaculture, lies in its assured harnessing of uncanny dissonances. Read More
How do two people recognize that at some future point, imperceptible to their current selves, they might break up—and still choose to love each other without boundary or trepidation? Read More