For all its strangeness and inexplicability, Billy Jack is very real, and its confusion and missteps make it more than a snapshot of its era—it’s a self-portrait of a country during a strange time. Read More
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Our May issue is focused on the films of 1971, so for the second episode of our podcast we decided to go deep on one of the more fascinating films released that year, Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge. Join co-hosts Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman, and returning special guest Zosha Millman, as they talk their way through Nichols' darkly complex and cinematic battle of the sexes. Read More
Even as the fictional world of Lucas’ painfully personal debut acts as an ode to a man who dares to defy corporate strictures, THX 1138’s very existence is also a dire warning to his future self about the futility of defying such an all-consuming conglomerate. Read More
The Straight Story represents the Lynchian world redeemed, a pocket of America that battled dread and violence and won, earning its just reward. Read More
Every adoption story is unique, yet every adoptee shares a common quality to our stories of origin: our entrance into a family is not solely through birth but through choice, a choice made entirely outside of our control. Read More
Big Fan's excursion into the psyche of an alienated sports fan now plays like a prophetic warning, anticipating a number of the more ruinous social pathologies that plague this country, from the incoherent angst of working-class white men to the epidemic of loneliness engulfing them. Read More
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Featured Essays
As a narrative, Kieślowski's Red is often recursively and sometimes even reflexively understood. It’s a film of ellipses, of threads dropped and picked up until, suddenly, they are woven. Read More
Blue Velvet's darkness and degeneracy and Oedipal weirdness serve a bigger and more beautiful story; a story about love, coming of age, redemption, hope. Read More
To talk about 12 Years a Slave is to talk about how much history has failed us, and we it. 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
In his art, Prince was America’s answer to Schopenhauer—he was a lightning rod, an earworm, an internal monologue from outside. Read More
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The tension Michael Mann’s Collateral sustains is effective because the movie understands the unequal relationship between employer and employee, between driver and passenger. Read More
I’ve found myself surprised by the ways I’ve returned to Dick over the years, how tenderly I catch myself thinking about it, the lightness that settles on me every time I watch it again. Read More
Bugs and Daffy aren’t all that opposite; Bugs and Daffy just want to be bodies. When collided, they have tremendous chemistry: one unflappable and unflappably committed to mischief, the other subject to seismic outcry at the first whiff of mischief, equally committed to dishing it back in full. Read More
Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday bring their authentic selves to It Should Happen to You, which relaxes both actors into an unforced rhythm that is all at once romantic, hilarious, and real. Read More
While Bill Forsyth has described his adaptation of Housekeeping as transcribing Marilynne Robinson’s language into some kind of filmic form, this undersells his ability to express the visual rhythms of sisterhood onto the screen. Read More
Perhaps it’s a cop-out to start a piece about Mommy on your own mother. You stick with it, because you don’t see any other way—when you love someone, you see their face everywhere, so of course everything you write leads back to her. Read More
From the archives
2013-2020
In Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson's Bobby Dupea is less a participant in any form of counterculture than someone who runs parallel to it, propelled from one place to the next by lingering dissatisfaction and an aversion to emotional labor. Read More
"I think it’s a movie to really be proud of, no matter how difficult it was to make. I’m glad that Kenny survived it, really, and that everyone will gradually come to watch Margaret eventually. I think it’s something that will last." Read More
David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner is a neo-noir comedy of manners masquerading as a thriller, a confidence game as light and effortless as a masterful card trick. Read More
The real crux of Aubrey and Maturin's friendship, what makes Master And Commander so rich in general, is the way in which the film challenges their relationship and also kind of has an answer for a very a la mode question: how do people with different political beliefs get along? Read More
Bugs and Daffy aren’t all that opposite; Bugs and Daffy just want to be bodies. When collided, they have tremendous chemistry: one unflappable and unflappably committed to mischief, the other subject to seismic outcry at the first whiff of mischief, equally committed to dishing it back in full. Read More
Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday bring their authentic selves to It Should Happen to You, which relaxes both actors into an unforced rhythm that is all at once romantic, hilarious, and real. Read More
The phenomenon of Martin and Lewis was always less about the uniqueness of the gags and more about the recognition of the spark between them. Read More
It’s the idea that belief and science are incompatible—that Mulder and Scully are intrinsically at odds—that opens The X-Files. But what drives it, what makes it work for now and forever, is the realization that, in the end, it’s all the same hail-mary prayer. Read More
I’ve found myself surprised by the ways I’ve returned to Dick over the years, how tenderly I catch myself thinking about it, the lightness that settles on me every time I watch it again. Read More
In terms of 21st century pairings, it's hard to find an actor-director collaboration that rivals Keira Knightley and Joe Wright in terms of thematic continuity, matched sensibilities, and a mutual evolution in storytelling. Read More
Comrades: Almost a Love Story exquisitely captures the angst between wanting to run from and being ceaselessly borne back into your roots. Read More
In Oscar Levant, we find more than the bridge between a man and his art. We find the bridge between the world as it is and the world we dream can come into being. Read More
The yearning and ecstatic hope of Stephen Sondheim’s songs in Evening Primrose creates a narrative and an aesthetic that is, to my eyes, distinctly queer. Read More
Who’s Singin’ Over There is at heart an allegory, using the platform of a road movie to ruminate on our capacity to fiddle whilst Rome burns. Read More
As much as Sound of Noise is a heist film, it’s a musical too. Read More