I want to live in the artificial worlds Richard Curtis creates, with their aesthetic rules and regulations, if only to live in a world where problems are surmountable, and everyone is funny. Read More
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While Revenge cuts a swath through the sandbox of some of the tropes of its genre, Coralie Fargeat's film is also powerfully, screamingly feminist. Read More
Bing Liu's Minding the Gap eschews traditional narrative arcs, touring wreckage of the past—a past that is still driving and informing the present—and redefining cinematic language as a means to an uncertain end. Read More
In allowing room for all the angles that motivate Amy, Enlightened asks us to consider the things that drive us, and ask ourselves: Do they make our fight any less valid if our hearts are in the right place? Read More
Nausicaä is a hero, but it’s not enough to want her to lead us, or to wait for her to save us. We must become her. Read More
The Conformist demonstrates how the violence of fascism often grows not from evil, but from nothingness. Read More
We have a moral obligation to be merciful, not just because it’s the humane thing to do—though it almost always is, even in the face of atrocity—but because of the minority report. Read More
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Featured Essays
More than any other Alien movie, David Fincher's Alien 3 is aware of Ripley’s existence as a woman, and the unique and universal horrors that come with the territory of inhabiting a woman’s body. Read More
Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight is a heist story, a sexy potboiler, a noir rom-com that resurrects and perfects the lost art of cinematic sexual tension. Read More
Lauren Wilford goes long with director Guillermo del Toro on art, life, death, morality and movies. Read More
What makes us flock to Christopher Nolan's films with our phones out, Twitter's engine warm and idling, ready to send our judgement out into the void? What have we done to so miss the point of going to the movies? Read More
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints manages to simultaneously suggest a vernacular, a presence, and a mythos Read More
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I'm not here to ask whether or not Some Like It Hot holds up. Of course it holds up! For crying out loud, what a bad question. Read More
If The Fortune Cookie isn't as powerful as Billy Wilder's earlier masterpieces, it's not as far off as its relative obscurity would imply. Read More
If one considers the chief tension of Billy Wilder’s work as the push and pull between cynicism and romanticism, the closing moments of a Wilder film complicate the notion that one can ever fully vanquish the other. Read More
Wilder makes a huge jump in genre between these films—from an existential noir to an off-beat romantic comedy—but the two share a kinship; both can be read as cautionary tales for what happens when you mix business with pleasure. Read More
A crackerjack pulp thriller that alternately smirked and shocked its way into defining both a expanding cinematic genre and a director’s burgeoning career with its gallows vantage, Double Indemnity also maybe lets slip the secret of life as it nuzzles up against (and makes a joke, seduction, and parable out of) death itself. Read More
It may be that with its real locations, non-professional performers, and documentary-style cinematography of the city surrounds, People on Sunday presages aspects of both Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. but it’s also a film about presaging. Read More
From the archives
2013-2020
Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War trilogy (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth) helped shape America’s collective memory of the Vietnam War at a crucial moment. Read More
A crackerjack pulp thriller that alternately smirked and shocked its way into defining both a expanding cinematic genre and a director’s burgeoning career with its gallows vantage, Double Indemnity also maybe lets slip the secret of life as it nuzzles up against (and makes a joke, seduction, and parable out of) death itself. Read More
The small tender heart of Mad Men isn’t obvious in the plot lines. Read More
Johnny Knoxville’s presence as a star has a lot to do with the desire of young men to test their bodies—not in rituals that prove their manhood, but in experiments that question its elasticity, its dexterity, its fluidity. 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
The relationship between Black American iconoclasm and French noir stylings highlights the contagious nature of social criticism itself, and the immensely broad potential for art and cinema to unite disparate but like-minded cultures. Read More
A Simple Favor works so well because it's perfectly cast—or rather, because its cast is perfectly suited to their roles. Read More
Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder is full of faces, and the last one we see belongs to former detective Park Doo-man of the Hwaseong police department in Korea. He's looking at the camera, but really, he's looking at us. Read More
On Knuckle Sandwich, the Paul Thomas Anderson Movie That Wasn’t. Read More
“Godzilla” is my personal shorthand for a feeling. It’s the fear you feel when you show someone a flawed movie that you nevertheless love, the pressure when you’re watching your best friend’s favorite movie with them for the first time, the rush you get when you find other people who share your fandoms, the conviction that your taste in media reveals an essential part of yourself. Read More
The Apu Trilogy is scarce in plot, but we fall in love with short bursts of characters, feeling their heartbreaks as our own. Read More
I’d love to know what it’s like to be a writer who doesn’t struggle with anxiety and depression, the sort of writer who doesn’t identify with Shirley, curled beneath her sheets in a blacked-out bedroom. Read More
Barry is about the lies we tell to live with ourselves, about characters caught between the truth and the stories that keep them safe. Read More
George Cukor wanted his films to be seen by thousands, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. If anything, this tension—between his genuine artistry and his desire to communicate with the wider American public—makes his films all the more interesting. Read More
Anxiety is Fury Road’s strongest throughline: the beating heart at its center. Read More
The best sports documentaries are those that remind us that these sweeping cultural legends center around protagonists who share our mundane flaws, who disappoint those they care about, who aren’t immunized against suffering and self-sabotage any more than the rest of us normals. Read More
Euphoria is glimpsed through Rue’s wide eyes and is precise in how it captures a mind discombobulated by loss. Read More