Mann’s cinema is that of love and longing on a life-and-death scale—all that matters are the compressed moments we have in which to share it.
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Mann’s cinema is that of love and longing on a life-and-death scale—all that matters are the compressed moments we have in which to share it.
What I’ve grown to appreciate is that Superman II is really a movie about the necessity of Superman as an American myth—about the very meaning of Superman.
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.
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Featured Essays
from the archives (2013 - 2025)
Interviews
Alice, Sweet Alice isn't a theological statement. Not solely. It doesn't posit lazy anti-Catholic bloviations or make the faithful into fools; it uses the imagery, the fables, the metaphors as inspiration for making a smartly, sickly compelling narrative of wickedness and the tragedy of tainted innocence.
Can Carrie White simultaneously be the hero and the monster? The clues lie in what has been jettisoned in an otherwise faithful adaptation from page to screen. By removing the conventional protagonist, the adaptation takes on ominous new implications and truly becomes a Brian De Palma film.
Watching All the President’s Men in 2026 provokes a gentle aching because it documents an ecosystem of institutional faith that no longer exists—that truth, once uncovered, possesses the power to shift the world.
The BW/DR Archives
Some Notes on Crying in the Bathroom
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