While Beginners and In a Lonely Place are radically different films, both portray their characters’ attempts to close the distance between themselves and others, drifting through chiasmatic stories from fear to delusion to fear again. Read More
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When trying to sell someone on the merits of Under the Silver Lake, I tend to fall back on the same phrase: “It’s a movie that’s having a nervous breakdown.” Read More
In William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A., a quintessential Los Angeles crime thriller, artifice reigns, but so too does art. Read More
By transposing Raymond Carver’s stories to Los Angeles, Robert Altman's Short Cuts fashions a narrative that is less about the Los Angeles of our collective imagination and more about the real LA most of us don’t care to know. Read More
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Featured Essays
Joe Versus the Volcano is a film that lives almost entirely in its own world, asking Big Questions about Big Things—but its heart is large, and its magic deep. Read More
All the President’s Men evokes a quiet, pervasive anguish. Read More
This is where humiliation lives: in the gap between the self we want to be and the self we actually are. Read More
Well before Christian Grey donned his dumb ripped jeans, James Spader embodied the paradigmatic combination of vulnerability and composure; his appeal, from Crash to Secretary, requires our conviction that he would, and would like to, and could, punish us—only gently. Read More
Breathless is at once a ferociously horny and formally audacious remake of Godard’s hyper-referential film, as well as an all-or-nothing, frenetically American and self-aware meditation on desperately empty people lost in the thrall of the pop culture that gives form to their wants and needs. Read More
We can’t all agree to keep the planet inhabitable, yet somehow we all agree about Dwayne Johnson. He’s a universal, human, humanist thirst trap—irresistible because he trades in things we can all agree on. Read More
By reframing fandom as tried and true romance, showing characters committing under the best and worst circumstances, Bull Durham raises different stakes than both traditional sports movies and traditional romantic comedies. Read More
In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a carnal energy roils and simmers in the air, like the thunderstorms rolling in over the plantation, drenching everyone to the bone. Read More
Let us thirst again, we beg. It’s one of the few things we have left. Read More
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Maybe what draws you to deep space is this species of terror: evidence of your vulnerability, but also of a primal intelligence inside you, a reminder that you’re still a feral animal somewhere within this misshapen human form. Read More
No one could say that Christine Chubbuck didn’t wish; if anything, she was undone by the fervency of her wishing. Read More
Simultaneously an unconsummated romance, aspirational Europorn, and a menopausal comedy of manners, Joanna Hogg's Unrelated is summer in a nutshell: bad feelings in good light. Read More
It’s no wonder that the story of Don Quixote is so eternally alluring to filmmakers. What could be more relatable than a man who expends all his worldly energy willing his self-contained reality into existence? Read More
Obsessed with manifesting Sorcerer’s message on film, Friedkin failed to see he was living that very message during its sanity-snapping production: that which is behind us cannot be returned to. All one can do is persevere for as long as possible into the fates that our pasts have shaped for us. Read More
Inevitably, the breach comes. More humans are lost, doomed to roam the earth themselves, joining the ranks of the undead. If the worst predictions about the climate crisis come true, we will only have ourselves to blame. The zombies were once, after all, us. And we have destroyed ourselves. Read More
From the archives
2013-2019
In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, "Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) is not a particularly mentionable person." Read More
A narrator first introduces us to this reality, but his words are superfluous — the hot spell’s influence is visible in every frame of Stray Dog. Read More
In The Ice Storm, Ang Lee invites us to know his characters by letting us live with them, walk the halls of their homes, and lay in their beds. Read More
Though John le Carré’s work has been adapted many times, far and away the best adaptation, Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, succeeds in large part because it understands le Carré’s underlying fascination with bureaucratic management. Read More
This month, we're casting our net over the wide expanse of summer, in all its various cinematic shades. Read More
Like amber traps a dragonfly, Saturday Night Fever catches, mid-flight, the moment of ‘70s zeitgeist that accommodated various—and conflicting—definitions of rape. Read More
Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is To the Wonder’s shadow, its doppelganger, its evil twin, and perhaps its better half. It’s Malick through the looking glass. Read More
I want to be Big Dick Richie, drenching myself in water to the beat of my favorite song. I want to be that alive to the present moment, that connected to my own heart. Read More
Despite the widow’s omnipresence in society, she remains an object of dangerous fixation. Read More
Around the margins of their sales work, the mag crew in American Honey lives a hedonistic existence, chasing impulses and urges, expressing themselves physically when their verbal powers fail them. Read More
Obsessed with manifesting Sorcerer’s message on film, Friedkin failed to see he was living that very message during its sanity-snapping production: that which is behind us cannot be returned to. All one can do is persevere for as long as possible into the fates that our pasts have shaped for us. Read More
Simultaneously an unconsummated romance, aspirational Europorn, and a menopausal comedy of manners, Joanna Hogg's Unrelated is summer in a nutshell: bad feelings in good light. Read More
Broadcast News presents adulthood as an exercise in weathering the relentless sensation of being not-quite-enough and not-quite-right. Read More
On Paul Verhoeven's Elle and the complications of the bad survivor. Read More
A sense of warring duality is everywhere in Princess Mononoke: selfishness and altruism, nature and humanity, life and death. Read More
In just under ten minutes of wordless story, Gabrielle Lissot’s Jukai shows us how our hardest-won lessons can become beams of light to illuminate the path forward for one another, and how even as the threads of our trauma form a tangle of sorrow, it’s a tangle that can be organized and reframed into our personal narrative, a story we can make use of to shelter and guide those that come after us. Read More
Inevitably, the breach comes. More humans are lost, doomed to roam the earth themselves, joining the ranks of the undead. If the worst predictions about the climate crisis come true, we will only have ourselves to blame. The zombies were once, after all, us. And we have destroyed ourselves. Read More