It’s not important to distinguish what is truth and what is fiction in Crestone; the collapsing of these boundaries is what gives Marnie Ellen Hertzler's documentary the same sense of apocalypse we've felt this past year, perceptively real in its feeling of unreality. Read More
Dick Johnson Is Dead wisely holds the mystery of human mortality with a generous open hand, affirming our pain while reminding us of grace. Read More
Along with being a damn entertaining ride, an understanding of the vital intimacy between women makes Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman feel gorgeously, confrontationally female. Read More
In His House, the spirit haunts, inhabiting space the same way a thought takes up residence in the mind. Worry, fears—these are ghosts. There and not there. False and yet very real. Read More
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Featured Essays
Did you know that roulette online is a trusted online betting site that has been proven to provide the best service to all members. I am five years... 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
Despite all of its hilarity and slapstick, Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday has a serious, dark heart. Read More
Throughout their body of work, Powell and Pressburger return to the question of whether life and art can co-exist, and if the urge to live or the urge to create will win out in the end. Read More
As a season, Twin Peaks: The Return contains itself; it answers its own questions and then undoes its entirety. Read More
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In this single shot, The Hunt for Red October presents its stakes: the struggle between an individual and the vast and powerful forces that threaten to swallow him. Read More
In the soft focus of his gaze, Costner shows us a man seeing his own life superimposed onto itself, the uncanny vertiginous struggle to reconcile your existence as someone’s child with your existence as someone’s parent, the effort to locate your own life through triangulation between lives spent and lives just beginning to unfold. Read More
A father and daughter dance in the ruins of the New Jersey boardwalk. Read More
Here, on the beach, Ada and Flora don't appear to be waiting so much as creating something new. Looking at this frame now, as a global pandemic distorts the hours that fill our days, I see a kind of hope and perseverance in how the characters interact with time. Read More
That ineffable quality that made Alain Delon a star, before all of the ugliness crept in, is suspended in this frame forever, in our memory always and indelibly empty, hollow, and blank. Read More
Derek Jarman’s Blue is a film that pushes the limits of cinematic expression, an unwavering blue screen accompanied by a layered soundscape of voices, music, and lyrically written dialogue. Read More
From the archives
2013-2020
Goon is the rare sports film that loves it subject and is smart enough not to romanticize it. Read More
On the journey to hell and back in The Crow. Read More
You know you’re in a great film within the first few minutes. Even in a challenging film, it becomes evident fairly quickly that the filmmaker is taking care of you—that the film has a reliable underlying logic in its narrative, its themes, and its characters. Like millions of others, Martin Scorsese’s... Read More
Tyrannosaurus Death! is a film that grabbed me, shook me, and spat me out with a new perspective on the balance between grace and pain that comprises this life. That’s a pretty good value in just 15 minutes. Read More
What if, Clue seems to ask, futility isn’t an Achilles’ heel—what if it’s the point? Read More
Given the show’s explicit judgment of judgment, it’s perplexing that many critiques, warranted as they are, overwhelmingly rely on and perpetuate a neurotic suspicion of pleasure. Read More
Death to Smoochy failed spectacularly when it was released, finding no purchase with viewers looking for an easy escape from the antebellum early aughts. But a film whose excesses lacked an audience in 2002 might just have found its spiritual home 18 years later. Read More
As each male performer in Young Frankenstein revels in his own strangeness, I find new ways to tap dance in my own haunted house. Read More
Like all good farces, Smiley Face feels heightened to the point that causality becomes nonsensical. This, too, is stoner logic: enjoy the journey, forget the destination. Read More
It’s easy to write off a movie like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so married as it is to the neon tackiness of the early 1990s; it’s much harder to recognize that placing itself squarely into that context is an extraordinary device. Read More
After flopping at the box office in February 2000, the dramedy was re-released in November of the same year—and flopped again. But it grossed my heart. Read More
Sacha Baron Cohen has always had a complicated, meta-textual relationship with irony; his trailblazing satirical work observes the ugliness of the United States while refusing to offer any solutions. Read More
Alien: Resurrection swings the pendulum away from the dour grimness of its predecessor towards a sense of humor and ironic self-awareness; the result is an Alien eager to thumb its nose at its precursors. It doesn’t care if anyone who loves those earlier films gets caught in the crossfire, either. Read More
The Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera is first and foremost about feeling over understanding, about distorting language, teasing it apart to get to the meat of it all. Read More
The Muppets are an invitation to look at our weird, messed up world, and laugh instead of cry. Their acceptance of chaos means an acceptance of everyone, from seven-foot-tall carrots to psychopathic coffee spokesman to neurotic frogs. Read More
If the world is going to rot, Daisies suggests, all that’s left to do is dig in. Read More
In 2020, Burn After Reading feels both more ridiculous and more painful than when it was first released—more capable of breaking down your defenses against laughter, and more likely to keep you up at night. Read More