Much of the exhilarating appeal of Artemis Shaw’s short, Aquaculture, lies in its assured harnessing of uncanny dissonances. Read More
Now Playing
Springsteen on Broadway restores and replenishes, briefly buoying our battered hearts and reminding us that we are capable of so much more. Read More
In First Avenger, all Captain America had for a compass was the dream. In Winter Soldier, he had the past. By Civil War, he’d seen both of these totems fall apart in the face of an America certain that it knew better than he did. Read More
Dr. Zhivago makes me think of how my own parents measure time: before the revolution, and after it. Read More
Extras
New Releases, Interviews, Festivals and More
As much as The Miseducation of Cameron Post is about finding salvation within one’s self, it is also about finding hope and protection in the arms of a chosen family. Read More
What makes Mission: Impossible — Fallout and Free Solo what they are is not death. It’s the spectatorship of death. It’s watching those around a person come to terms with what we all know is out there. Read More
Much of what I saw in 2018 reflected a related range of anxieties—about difference, catastrophe, isolation, belonging. Maybe that’s every year. Likely it’s too soon to tell. But among the things I saw, in a year of personal and political upheaval and ambivalence, these are the moments that solicited my attention most memorably. Read More
Disobedience is a film as fluent in its rendering of the burden of orthodoxy as it is well-versed in the holy liberation of letting go. Read More
In both The Haunting of Hill House and Annihilation, landscapes are the loci of the characters’ malfunctions. Hill House and Area X, respectively, give their characters a place to focus their energy—and then use that energy, that sense of comfort, to undo them. Read More
Mandy is a visionary catalogue of the ways in which we attempt to survive, embrace, or succumb to the pain of living with death, and what happens when we lose the one thing that holds our world together. Read More
Featured Essays
Explaining Dr. No to my newborn daughter made me feel alive, present, conscious of the sweep of time. 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
To talk about 12 Years a Slave is to talk about how much history has failed us, and we it. Read More
We'll never use your email for any purpose other than emailing about Bright Wall/Dark Room, and guarantee that it won't be shared with third parties.
Issue 66: Food
December 2018
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
It can be so frustrating to have parents, particularly at mealtimes. Read More
The meals in Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child and Landline are not extravagant as dining experiences, but they are meaningful as relational ones: small, comforting rituals that provide a moment of constancy amidst chaos. Read More
From the archives
2013-2019
The most established character in the documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day is the audience. Read More
In a way, The Uninvited is Stella’s coming of age. Read More
A movie lover always remembers their first Hitchcock. Read More
"While this critic’s average number of films taken in at the TIFF usually hovers around 30, the 2018 festival delivered the highest percentage yet of selections I could recommend in good faith." Read More
Sharp Objects is a slow-burning gothic horror about rage and shame and grief, one that explores—in meticulous, at times uncomfortable detail—what it feels like to live in both the midst and the aftermath of trauma. Read More
This is where humiliation lives: in the gap between the self we want to be and the self we actually are. Read More
As much as The Miseducation of Cameron Post is about finding salvation within one’s self, it is also about finding hope and protection in the arms of a chosen family. Read More
It's hard to know whether The Mule will be Clint Eastwood’s final film, either in front of or behind the camera—but it sure feels like it. Read More
On the one hand, everything we do may be meaningless. Oblivion may be the only truth. But on the other, maybe it’s exactly this ultimate despair that makes our all our everyday actions essential. Read More
A mid-winter love affair feels decadent but also rather necessary, and Cold War rewards like a hot chocolate spiked with brandy: warming, bracing, to be savored. Read More
This scream is a scream of defiance. Read More
The cinematic alchemy of Burning transforms an abstract theory of liminality into something that an audience can feel in the pulse of every scene and then, perhaps, in their own world. Read More
What makes Mission: Impossible — Fallout and Free Solo what they are is not death. It’s the spectatorship of death. It’s watching those around a person come to terms with what we all know is out there. 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
Loving My Best Friend’s Wedding doesn’t necessarily mean loving all of it, and yet, here I am saying I do. Read More
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a skin-flayed, nerve-burst confession, a self-loathing crucifixion of the kind of toxically hyper masculine pathology that poisoned Sam Peckinpah's personal life, but inspired his deliriously compelling art. Read More
To be aware of beauty is to be corrupted by it, to develop a covetous lust for it, to equate possessing it with consuming it. Read More