Ridley Scott's House of Gucci sits in a frustrating liminal space, always both too much and not enough, preposterous in its way, but not as preposterous as it should be.
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This month on the show, we’re diving deep into Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog with film critic and Quorum (Film Quarterly) editor Girish Shambu, author of The New Cinephilia. We talk about Campion’s signature expressionism, the versatility of props, masculinities, Jonny Greenwood, and the capital-R Romanticism of this profound gothic western.
The more I see Riders of Justice, the more I understand how this oddball philosophical comedy served as a perfect balm for my weird, terrible year.
Drive My Car suggests that art itself is a vehicle for both communication and self-exploration. It can communicate what cannot be said out loud, if we are willing to listen, and can also be the vessel through which we better understand who we are.
Whatever Bo Burnham’s Inside is—a stand-up routine, a television special, a piece of musical theater, a music album, a documentary, a cinematic selfie, a confession—I think it’s cinema.
Licorice Pizza offered me more of the joys of cinema than anything has in years, but I regret its perpetuation of an erasure ironically similar to that practiced in the era Anderson satirizes.
The magic trick of Joanna Hogg’s film is not so much that The Souvenir Part II is funnier or stranger or better than its predecessor: it’s that Part II redefines both films as another form of memoir entirely.
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Featured Essays
I have watched The Memory of Justice dozens of times, devoting countless hours to taking notes and rewinding key moments and sleeping and dreaming and eating and waking, all while inundated—saturated, really—by my own memories of justice.
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?
In his art, Prince was America’s answer to Schopenhauer—he was a lightning rod, an earworm, an internal monologue from outside.
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.
I want to be Big Dick Richie, drenching myself in water to the beat of my favorite song. I want to be that alive to the present moment, that connected to my own heart.
Like most of the serial killer thrillers it’s said to vanguard, Manhunter smacks of gender. Our hardened hero is not just softened by his traumatic past, but broken by it, his manhood warped by the terror that now governs him.
Part-essay, part-collage, part-apocalyptic tone poem, Bitter Lake captures better than any other film, both factually and aesthetically, the chaotic quagmire of the Afghanistan war, while situating it within a historical context that gives some clarity to the madness.
Other, more recent superhero films may claim to be grim—and certainly achieve a gritty, surface-level style—but in Batman Returns, we have something that seems to deliver an underbelly of actual darkness: upsettingly discolored bodily fluids, thrillingly unhealthy psychosexual games, raw fish, toxic sewage, and a semi-catatonic ‘hero’ who barely speaks.
Don’t Look Now is a story about vision. The things we see, the things we don’t, the things we see without using our eyes.
Nationality is the theme that bookends The English Patient, looping one timeline back into the other and overriding Almásy and Katharine’s affair as the ultimate question of the narrative.
My unpopular opinion is that Wild Mountain Thyme is a transcendent work of art. Not from any objective standpoint, but rather from that of one particular head and heart: my own.
An end of year message to all those who've helped us keep going. (Plus, a playlist too!)
My unpopular opinion is that Wild Mountain Thyme is a transcendent work of art. Not from any objective standpoint, but rather from that of one particular head and heart: my own.
Part-essay, part-collage, part-apocalyptic tone poem, Bitter Lake captures better than any other film, both factually and aesthetically, the chaotic quagmire of the Afghanistan war, while situating it within a historical context that gives some clarity to the madness.
Nationality is the theme that bookends The English Patient, looping one timeline back into the other and overriding Almásy and Katharine’s affair as the ultimate question of the narrative.
Other, more recent superhero films may claim to be grim—and certainly achieve a gritty, surface-level style—but in Batman Returns, we have something that seems to deliver an underbelly of actual darkness: upsettingly discolored bodily fluids, thrillingly unhealthy psychosexual games, raw fish, toxic sewage, and a semi-catatonic ‘hero’ who barely speaks.
Orson Welles' Othello is a fever dream in both production and result—the former a nightmare, the latter bliss.
Was it always supposed to get this bad? Can it possibly get any worse? These questions are never spoken in Sidney Lumet’s masterfully taut Fail Safe, but endlessly they bounce around the margins.
Like most of the serial killer thrillers it’s said to vanguard, Manhunter smacks of gender. Our hardened hero is not just softened by his traumatic past, but broken by it, his manhood warped by the terror that now governs him.
This month on the show, we're joined by poet, educator, and original BW/DR co-conspirator Elizabeth Cantwell to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s (now) beloved psychosexual Christmas thriller, Eyes Wide Shut.
Don’t Look Now is a story about vision. The things we see, the things we don’t, the things we see without using our eyes.
On the unbearable, beautiful messiness of a single line from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is a self-fulfilling prophecy that undoes itself in the telling, an ouroboros regurgitating its own tail rather than eating it.
