The further we get from American Psycho’s release, the closer we get to the world it depicted. The satire becomes more pointed, but instead of being a fun indictment of the ‘80s, it becomes an unsettling reflection of the way we live now. Read More
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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
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Featured Essays
Rear Window is a movie about the stories we choose to tell. Read More
Every shot in Columbus exudes an intentionality which is controlled but not controlling, each scene an austere but life-filled canvas. Read More
Joe Versus the Volcano reminds us that there’s a whole lot of world-weary out there these days, and nowhere near enough whimsy; that there’s a magic in all of us that’s so rarely considered. Read More
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
Fragmented, discontinuous, and piercingly personal, Cameraperson is a testament to what it means to be open and alive to the variegated voices of our world. 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
Every time I pick up one of Carrie Fisher's books, or turn on Postcards from the Edge, I remember that there are other people like me in this world, living weirdly, just trying to figure it out. 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
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Star! was a movie solely predicated on the idea that audiences would turn out in droves simply to see Julie Andrews in another grand-scale musical. It gives her no conflicts. It dramatizes no challenges for her to overcome. And it lasts 2 hours and 53 minutes. Read More
Clocking in at 152 minutes, Funny People is practically a Lav Diaz film in comparison to its American studio comedy brethren. Read More
It would seem paradoxical for a film to be both excessive and minimalist, and yet this synthesis is exactly what Wim Wenders achieves with Kings of the Road, taking a storyline so small that it strains the very definition of the term and blowing it out to epic length. Read More
From the archives
2013-2019
What’s so magical about Nichols and May is that they don’t play a straight man or a funny man. They’re both, and they’re neither: they’re everything. Read More
Near the end of David Lynch’s harrowing Fire Walk With Me, Laura Palmer and fellow teen prostitute Ronette Pulaski are being accompanied through the woods at night by Laura’s demon-possessed father and rapist, Leland, who is about to murder her. Leland followed Laura to a cabin where she and Ronette were... Read More
On the Before trilogy, and when midnight comes for love. Read More
Every time I pick up one of Carrie Fisher's books, or turn on Postcards from the Edge, I remember that there are other people like me in this world, living weirdly, just trying to figure it out. Read More
Fragmented, discontinuous, and piercingly personal, Cameraperson is a testament to what it means to be open and alive to the variegated voices of our world. Read More
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
Sometimes I think I have to stop believing in movies like October Sky. 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
Inherent Vice is a film that tricks us into settling in for a noir about a man solving a mystery, and instead presents us with a man confronting a melancholy truth: everything—lives, eras, and loves—comes to an end. Read More
On The Candidate, All the President's Men, The Post, and Vice. Read More
Is the story of China's last ruler being overthrown deserving of an epic? Or, perhaps a better question: Would this be the epic a Chinese filmmaker would make? Read More
We are so used to films that rush us through emotions, showing us something real being felt, before quickly cutting to the next scene. A film like The Emigrants, open to experiencing difficult emotions and sharing them with its audience, can only do so sensitively, and with time. Read More
"It’s a super testosteroney movie—a bunch of men, a lot of violence, the cops are dudes, the guys in the neighborhoods are dudes. But no one was looking at this with empathy, like, “What does it mean to be a human being living in this space?” To me that was a very female gaze, though the movie wasn’t about women." Read More
In the images from Sátántangó that still cling to me, I see my mind’s selective memory: its search at work. How the memories of scenes become not a catalogue of the film, but another creation altogether. Read More
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