Kelsey Ford on murder mysteries, gentleman sleuths, and Rian Johnson's Knives Out. Read More
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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
The way we experience movies shapes the way we experience life, and to experience a movie like The Beach Bum, to ingest and absorb this much giddy existential gratitude, strikes at least this viewer as quite a blessing. Read More
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Featured Essays
Near the end of David Lynch’s harrowing Fire Walk With Me, Laura Palmer and fellow teen prostitute Ronette Pulaski are being accompanied through the woods at night by Laura’s demon-possessed... Read More
"The thing Moonstruck lets you walk away feeling is: who cares. You find your person and then you figure it out." Read More
God never speaks in Groundhog Day. At best, they make themselves known through Phil's implacable bedside alarm clock. Read More
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Mike Mills' Beginners and 20th Century Women are both deeply personal and generous films, acknowledging how impossible it is to ever truly know one’s parent or child. Read More
The fundamental ethos of Catholicism in its purest form is the animating idea of The Immigrant. Its philosophical approach transcends the specific particulars of the Church, instead acquiring an operatic, metaphorical scale. Read More
As I watched Twin Peaks: The Return each week, I couldn’t help but recall the words of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” Read More
Sean Baker's The Florida Project is among the most memorable and powerful Disney—or, at least, Disney-adjacent—films of the 21st century. Read More
Rick Alverson's 2012 film The Comedy is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a piece of filmmaking that critiques the very game it plays. Read More
If this is a list, let it be a syllabus, a series of entry points joined by common questions: What does it look and sound like to understand your life, previously envisioned as exclusively “ahead,” as incrementally, but increasingly, behind? What can a moment of emotional accuracy accomplish? What imperative pleasures does meticulousness afford? Read More
From the archives
2013-2020
The staying power of The Shawshank Redemption is by turns fascinating and baffling. Read More
In the Coen brothers’ 1996 film Fargo, Jerry Lundegaard walks into a North Dakota bar in a cloud of discomfort and, we imagine, arctic air. Read More
The Muppet Movie, like all truly great art, focuses myriad points of anguished thought and feeling into a single beam of light—in this case, literally—to demonstrate, with a simplicity that belies its depth, its own magnificence. Read More
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence features mismatched animation styles, non sequitur montages, a sphinxlike plot presentation, and bulky meditations on the nature of reality. But such committed excessiveness, for this viewer, makes Innocence my favorite kind of film: powerful in its earnestness, and captivating in its thoughtful defiance. Read More
If you’ve been around the site lately, you probably noticed that our paywall has been down, and you could freely access the site. That changes today with the launch... Read More
Fargo is an outlier in the world of neo-noir, protecting its heroes by ending their stories and defiantly leaving their purity intact as though to prove that happy endings are possible. Read More
It’s hard to absorb Black Widow if one is unprepared to see women as people. But once the audience understands that the relationship between these women powers the film—not their relationships with the men around them—its true quality becomes evident. Read More
In neo-noir roles, Mickey Rourke’s faces change, but his power as an actor never does. Read More
Critics and fans have accurately described Hustlers as a bedazzled Recession-era period piece. But the movie is equally specific to our times, the first in Hollywood history to produce movie after movie about ordinary(ish) women doing crimes. Read More
It would be natural to assume it’s impossible to recreate Harold Pinter’s effects on-screen. What cinematic setting could ever replicate the feeling of an ordinary space that simultaneously exists in a howling metaphysical void? 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
Jane Campion's In the Cut dresses itself up as a neo-noir about a woman who “can contend only against the power of men.” But it’s a film that’s more than meets the eye, or the genre. Read More
I avoided both Heat and Jackie Brown until 2019. I recognize that this is irrational self-sabotage. It is, in this case, especially irrational behavior given that my number-one all-time celebrity crush is mid-‘90s Robert De Niro. Read More
Veronica Mars and Philip Marlowe share this: the palpable sense that their cynicism exactly stems from their compassion, that their hardness is the scar tissue of a heart they can’t stop the world from breaking over and over. Read More
Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar is so rigorously, comprehensively excessive, its excesses eclipse any baseline against which excess is typically judged. Read More