This month on the podcast, we discuss Luca Guadagnino’s 2009 melodrama I Am Love with author, critic, and Wesleyan film professor Lisa Dombrowski.
Now Playing
In cinema, chosen family melodramas are sprawling, surprising, and passionate films, playing with the traditional forms to reflect bonds that are often in flux and difficult to describe.
This month on the podcast, we discuss Luca Guadagnino’s 2009 melodrama I Am Love with author, critic, and Wesleyan film professor Lisa Dombrowski.
Art is the high drama and the low drama, and often, as Schama shows us, it’s the reflection of the artists’ own life, their fear, pain, joy, and frustrations, their family relationships, loves, and losses.
Brief Encounter is structured as a wistful confession told by a sensible person attempting to grapple with heartache in the most sensible way possible.
In Polyester, John Waters skewers the melodrama’s achy-breaky conventions by ramping them up to 11.
On Degrassi, no one is beautiful and everything hurts. If I had to sum up high school in a sentence, I couldn’t do much better than that.
New Releases, Interviews, Festivals and 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.
Featured Essays
As a play, a film, and a television series, Scenes from a Marriage examines a relationship in brutally exacting, loving detail.
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints manages to simultaneously suggest a vernacular, a presence, and a mythos
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is as much about the incalculable weight of this mythology as it is the titular deed.
On Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Chinatown, and the battle for L.A.’s soul.
Secretary never exploits or stereotypes BDSM for sport; never uses it as a sideshow; never markets it as a pathology to overcome.
Maybe I’m being hyperbolic here, but does anyone better exemplify sex, drugs, and rock and roll than Fleetwood Mac?
“November Rain” is more than a music video. It’s every idea that existed in hard rock in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s compressed into nine minutes.
Like nearly everything David Lynch has created, Wild at Heart haunts the space after the idyllic 1950s American suburban dream was proven corrupt, but outside of an ability to not at least secretly long for some shred of that back.
To salute our May theme, Chad sits down with deputy cohost Fran Hoepfner and movie and music writer Sydney Urbanek, to discuss the greatest initially-PG-rated movie of all time(?): Miloš Forman’s 1984 Amadeus.
While fictionalized accounts of rock stars' sex lives and personal relationships are often sensational, The Hours and Times distinguishes itself as a small-scale, conversational film, one that centralizes an ambiguous relationship.
In spite of the Total Request Live and low-cut bootleg pants of it all, Josie and the Pussycats captures—and then eviscerates—the bizarre contours of early-2020s culture with more clarity than any piece of contemporary media.
The wig is the central motif of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, an expression of hyper-femininity that also functions as a mask in how it draws the eyes up and away from her face, the cacophony of glitter brushed above the eye as well as the palpable loneliness swirling inside of it.
That Thing You Do! gleams with friendliness, gladness, soulfulness—the kind of personable perfectionism of a homespun masterwork.
We have mythologized Sid and Nancy because we need to make sense of senselessness.
The Crimson Kimono is not a typical mystery; instead, it uses the conventional trappings of the hardboiled detective story to explore a taboo topic for its time.
While I'm Not There features several inspired leaps, few are as audacious as reimagining Bob Dylan as a young African American kid.
“November Rain” is more than a music video. It’s every idea that existed in hard rock in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s compressed into nine minutes.
While fictionalized accounts of rock stars' sex lives and personal relationships are often sensational, The Hours and Times distinguishes itself as a small-scale, conversational film, one that centralizes an ambiguous relationship.
Lock the door: for our April devotional to Paul Newman, we’re revisiting Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Vulture critic Roxana Hadadi.
Using humor and goodwill, Cookie Mueller drafted her own terms for navigating life within a misogynistic society.
In spite of the Total Request Live and low-cut bootleg pants of it all, Josie and the Pussycats captures—and then eviscerates—the bizarre contours of early-2020s culture with more clarity than any piece of contemporary media.
What makes Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell so refreshing is its admission of recovery as a continued effort.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid frustrates me like family.
