The beauty of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women lies in the imperfection, the gap between a writer’s life and her story, old and new, girlhood and womanhood and the messy road between. Read More
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March 2020
Sometimes, the only thing a woman can do is let herself be seen on her own terms. Read More
All Quiet on the Western Front is both thoroughly of its own historical moment and a timeless argument against war and nationalism. Read More
Celebrity documentaries have always fed on pain, but the way that pain is framed has changed radically in the last half-century; celebrity itself is now a disease—an affliction that curdles the mind and batters the body all while coating you in gold. Read More
When I close my eyes and think of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, I see red; when I do the same with Luca Guadagnino’s, I see bone. Read More
The Dardenne brothers take our pre-understanding of revenge films and mercifully dismantle it. No graphic violence is depicted and no scapegoat is needed—the sacrifice and forgiveness are wholly internal. Read More
Many cynical “hot takes” regarding historical accuracy appear to miss something vital about cinematic storytelling as an art form: that it works by creating patterns and rhythm, by adhering to familiar story shapes and rules, and by communicating ideas through signs and symbols. Read More
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Featured Essays
The dialectics of Spike Jonze's Her follow the limitations and liberties of technology and humanity. Read More
My Neighbor Totoro is a children’s film for the world as it is, and for the world as it should be. Read More
On doubles, haunted spaces, memory, and grief in Twin Peaks, Possession, and Vertigo 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
alone * For a collection of seasons, I saw a therapist every Monday night. In the winter, the street lamps would throw themselves through the blind slats and ladder across... Read More
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Whether by accident or instinct, Carnival of Souls captures a sense of alienation. And the film itself, fiercely independent, with a singular vision, experienced a similar outcome as its protagonist. Read More
Never have I encountered a more fascinating case of self-indulgence than the diptych of Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky, two films identical in plot but divergent in story, one chilly and distant and the other seeming to have been shot from inside the most passionate depths of the director’s soul. Read More
The great feat of Gangs of New York is to set itself against familiar versions of American mythology by making American history alien, and, therefore, opening up new perspectives on it. Read More
The Fall is the product of people who throw themselves into the creation of fictions that reflect their own lives, even if those reflections are unintentional, even if each person is really trying to forget about the kind of pain that feels like it will last forever. Read More
Fuses is a labor of love, but it’s Schneemann’s labor that’s often overlooked; the film isn't solely a “diaristic indulgence"—an accusatory phrase levied by male filmmakers—but an immersive creative experience. Read More
Book Club plants itself firmly in a chaotic-good alignment chart position, full of well-meaning spirit that occasionally goes completely off the rails. Read More
From the archives
2013-2020
If The Last Picture Show is a movie about savoring your precious misery, Texasville is a movie about having a bad case of the blues. Read More
Dark City takes many of the same premises as The Matrix but follows them into territory that is far more literary, examining themes of memory, character, and fate. Read More
Punch-Drunk Love—Paul Thomas Anderson’s fourth film, released when he was just 32 years old—puts you on uncertain footing from the very first frame. Read More
When I watch shows like Chef’s Table or Cooked, something stirs within me—like flavor from rot, and life from death. Read More
Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman works as a time capsule for a specific era and place, preserving the image of Taiwan—a picture of prosperity and encroaching Western influence—as it hurtled toward the 21st century. Read More
I frequently took my mental temperature after this year’s Sundance screenings, searching for symptoms of that dreaded ailment, festival fever. I’ve fought mightily to maintain critical detachment, but it bears acknowledgement that the following assessments were made during one of the most emotionally tumultuous weeks I can remember. Read More
Queer people, refugees, those of us displaced from the linearity of the present who love people and places long gone: we’re always time traveling. We journey between the possible and impossible by way of memory, and art emerges in the crossing. Read More
Midnight Kiss is a horror film for the age of Mayor Pete, imagining a self-cultivated gay emptiness at the turn of the decade. Read More
Neither BoJack Horseman nor the plays of Henrik Ibsen tell stories about magic, but the ways in which creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg has woven the playwright into his show is a narrative trick as good as any. Read More
There’s a question that has long been my personal riddle of the sphinx: what is “a Sundance movie”? Read More
There was no shortage of enthralling female protagonists in 2019, many in films much more engaging than It Chapter Two—but Beverly Marsh is the one I keep coming back to. Read More
Kelsey Ford on murder mysteries, gentleman sleuths, and Rian Johnson's Knives Out. Read More
Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory is a film unapologetically about films, where the subject is equal parts passion and profession, addiction and therapy. Read More
Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story has nothing but empathy, the kind I’ve been craving, for Charlie and Nicole Barber—even when it would be easy not to, and especially when they have so little for each other. Read More
Honey Boy and Doctor Sleep bleed from the same heart, an intimate diptych about abused boys who grow into men haunted by and reaching for their fathers. Read More
Instead of taking issue with the facts of what Frank Sheeran tells us, The Irishman unravels the way he positions himself within his account. Read More
Whenever I put on I Think You Should Leave, its bedlam feels like a weighted blanket—a brief and soothing respite from the horrible truths of the outside world. Read More