In Michael Mann's Heat, both Neil (De Niro) and Vincent (Pacino) are dedicated to their respective work, their respective codes. And for both, this extreme dedication will cost them everything they’re fighting for.
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Once upon a time they did make movies about us, and they starred Diane Lane. In 2002, at age 36, she played Connie in Unfaithful, and in 2003, at 37, she played Frances in Under the Tuscan Sun. Movies—and characters—that, until recent rewatches, I never saw as the siblings they are: Two married women whose lives come to a head, and the different paths they take toward discovery. One is about ripping it all apart, the other about building it all back up.
If John Frankenheimer's Seconds came out today, with its horror lens firmly trained on themes of extreme plastic surgery, dread of aging, and get-happy-quick schemes, it would likely have found a ready A24 audience and a series of Oscar nods. But in 1966, audiences hated it.
This month, Chad and Elizabeth sit down with author Karina Wolf to discuss midlife crisis and Thomas Vinterberg's 2020 film, Another Round.
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from the archives (2013 - 2025)
Nostalgia is cheap, and plenty of films peddling it have died on the vine. What sets Back to the Future apart is not that it is nostalgic, but that it grasps nostalgia as a production, a site of labor. It doesn’t remember the past; it re-manufactures it, to spec, on a studio lot.
Rob Reiner's Stand by Me is about memory. It’s about the ways in which the people who matter do keep standing by us, even after they’ve fallen away.
More often than not, the blockbuster bomb is true of heart, true of passion, and truly, deliriously confounding. These disinherited poor relations aren’t so much Hollywood’s nightmares as they are fever dreams: wild, half-coherent visions barely remembered but always deeply felt.
The BW/DR Archives
Florida Man
The Gatorskin Noir and Satirical Softcore of Wild Things
Beverly Hills, What a Thrill!
Troop Beverly Hills (1989)
Some Notes on Crying in the Bathroom
The Films of Billy Wilder
Smoking Harvard
How High (2001)
Simulacra and Simian
Better Man (2024)
Dear Jennifer Coolidge
Austenland (2013)