In Howl’s Moving Castle, food is more than just a necessity—it sustains life, in every sense of the phrase: helping a body hold skin and sinew together, while acting as an expression of love and care. Read More
Now Playing
The meals in Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child and Landline are not extravagant as dining experiences, but they are meaningful as relational ones: small, comforting rituals that provide a moment of constancy amidst chaos. Read More
November 2018
On Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna Read More
What Persona produces, onscreen and in its critics, is more than the sum of its narrative parts. Read More
Harriet Andersson’s contributions to Bergman’s oeuvre cannot be understated—her fearlessness about her body within a performance allowed her to create something both fierce and distinctive. Read More
"I’ve done a lot of other things, but when I look back on my work… [my work with Bergman was] probably what gave me most life. Because I was so alive, and I was trusted so much." Read More
Criterion’s about to release the most complete collection of Bergman films yet. It’s a great opportunity to throw out the clichés and invite new perspectives. Here at Bright Wall, we’re taking the whole month to do just that. Read More
Ingmar Bergman's second film is a tonally-daring Expressionist chiaroscuro of broken lives attempting to escape a rain-soaked nightworld of broken dreams. Read More
Extras
New Releases, Interviews, Festivals and More
On the twisted war of influence in Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite. Read More
"I’ve done a lot of other things, but when I look back on my work… [my work with Bergman was] probably what gave me most life. Because I was so alive, and I was trusted so much." Read More
Seeing movies is a gift, and I can’t wait to go back next year. Read More
"In my experience, human beings are the same. We laugh like each other, we fall in love like each other, we get sad like each other, we have the same emotions in the same conditions everywhere." Read More
Featured Essays
“The reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.” —Thomas... Read More
Lots of comedies are funny because they’re goofy, but Step Brothers is funny for the liminality of the world in which it takes place, a world hovering between live-action cartoon and kitchen-sink reality so precariously that it almost seems to violate the laws of comedy physics. Read More
Frances Ha is about friendship, but it’s also about figuring out how to make a job out of doing what you love. Read More
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From the archives
Goon is the rare sports film that loves it subject and is smart enough not to romanticize it. 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... Read More
Jurassic Park began as a novel, a cautionary tale about genetic engineering. On screen, it became a metaphor for reproductive fears and patriarchal control. Read More
Nostalghia is a film about waiting, about the long journey before the arrival. Read More
An interview with Brianna Ashby illustration by Brianna Ashby Bright Wall/Dark Room: So, Brianna, when did you first start watching Mad Men? Brianna Ashby: I’ve been in from the beginning—I came for the seemingly endless parade of... Read More
Ingmar Bergman's second film is a tonally-daring Expressionist chiaroscuro of broken lives attempting to escape a rain-soaked nightworld of broken dreams. Read More
As a play, a film, and a television series, Scenes from a Marriage examines a relationship in brutally exacting, loving detail. Read More
On Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna Read More
Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf is the story of a marriage crumbling in a void. Read More
"I’ve done a lot of other things, but when I look back on my work… [my work with Bergman was] probably what gave me most life. Because I was so alive, and I was trusted so much." Read More
Criterion’s about to release the most complete collection of Bergman films yet. It’s a great opportunity to throw out the clichés and invite new perspectives. Here at Bright Wall, we’re taking the whole month to do just that. Read More
Jonathan Glazer's 2004 film, Birth, is a meticulously composed film about falling apart. Read More
Practical Magic is finest in the moments it elevates the raucous comedies and petty dramas of siblinghood into the heightened life and death stakes of witches in peril. Read More
In making the strange, familiar (and the familiar, strange), Gattaca forces us to reckon with our own humanity and mortality—and the fact that time is coming for us all. Read More
Stoker is a film about a girl walking the tight ledge between childhood and adulthood, and trying to construct an identity amidst the chaos. Read More
The visuals in Yolanda and the Thief take explicit inspiration from the surrealist landscapes of Salvador Dalí, and while it isn’t the most successful of Vincente Minnelli’s celebrated musicals, it is perhaps the most experimental—and, for me an object of fascination. Read More
A Serious Man isn't just a more personal Coen Brothers film; it is the personal Coen Brothers film, an investigation into their own heritage and what it means to be Jewish in mid-century America. Read More