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.
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David Cronenberg's Videodrome is a contradictorily compact cinematic expanse of carnality and carnage.
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.
It’s a dark November night, and Colton Underwood has finally escaped The Bachelor. Bachelor Nation would never be the same.
On the spectatorship of Psycho and Santa Sangre, and queer people’s relationship to horror.
Steven Soderbergh’s KIMI gives voice to universal anxieties around modern technology with alarming accuracy.
We can’t help but look and listen. Yet what if it were not a burden, but even a call for self-reflection and an incitement to change?
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...
When I watch My Own Private Idaho I feel a profound nostalgia for the person I was, for the city I loved.
Blue Velvet's darkness and degeneracy and Oedipal weirdness serve a bigger and more beautiful story; a story about love, coming of age, redemption, hope.
The Warriors is about living with—through, during—the night, a lesson we all learn as kids, and carry with us as we sleep. It’s not so much about the fear of what’s behind, but about running as fast as possible toward what’s on the other side.
What Richard Linklater captures in Boyhood is not the story of a boy growing up, but boyhood as identity—the edification of one small American dream.
Issue 108: Voyeur
This month on the podcast, we discuss Luca Guadagnino’s 2009 melodrama I Am Love with author, critic, and Wesleyan film professor Lisa Dombrowski.
In cinema, chosen family melodramas are sprawling, surprising, and passionate films, playing with the traditional forms to reflect bonds that are often in flux and difficult to describe.
In Polyester, John Waters skewers the melodrama’s achy-breaky conventions by ramping them up to 11.
On Degrassi, no one is beautiful and everything hurts. If I had to sum up high school in a sentence, I couldn’t do much better than that.
In Fassbinder's Fear of Fear, a housewife’s desperation is as universal a story as you can get—the story of the impossible reconciliation between looking after and being seen.
Art is the high drama and the low drama, and often, as Schama shows us, it’s the reflection of the artists’ own life, their fear, pain, joy, and frustrations, their family relationships, loves, and losses.
This month on the podcast, we discuss Luca Guadagnino’s 2009 melodrama I Am Love with author, critic, and Wesleyan film professor Lisa Dombrowski.
On Degrassi, no one is beautiful and everything hurts. If I had to sum up high school in a sentence, I couldn’t do much better than that.
L.A. Story is romantic, hopelessly. Our four lovestruck main characters fall in and out of their spells. The tone gets mushy. The freeway sign is embraced. The paradise could be believed.
It’s a tricky thing to blend highly stylized artifice with real emotion, and perhaps David Lynch's Wild at Heart doesn’t always get it right. The attempt, though, is pure rock ‘n roll.
In cinema, chosen family melodramas are sprawling, surprising, and passionate films, playing with the traditional forms to reflect bonds that are often in flux and difficult to describe.
In Fassbinder's Fear of Fear, a housewife’s desperation is as universal a story as you can get—the story of the impossible reconciliation between looking after and being seen.
The Happiness of the Katakuris shimmers with an almost Muppet-level cheer and earnestness, even as cadavers pile up and zombies skulk.
To salute our May theme, Chad sits down with deputy cohost Fran Hoepfner and movie and music writer Sydney Urbanek, to discuss the greatest initially-PG-rated movie of all time(?): Miloš Forman’s 1984 Amadeus.
In Polyester, John Waters skewers the melodrama’s achy-breaky conventions by ramping them up to 11.
Art is the high drama and the low drama, and often, as Schama shows us, it’s the reflection of the artists’ own life, their fear, pain, joy, and frustrations, their family relationships, loves, and losses.
Brief Encounter is structured as a wistful confession told by a sensible person attempting to grapple with heartache in the most sensible way possible.
Maybe I’m being hyperbolic here, but does anyone better exemplify sex, drugs, and rock and roll than Fleetwood Mac?
