By reframing fandom as tried and true romance, showing characters committing under the best and worst circumstances, Bull Durham raises different stakes than both traditional sports movies and traditional romantic comedies. Read More
Now Playing
In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a carnal energy roils and simmers in the air, like the thunderstorms rolling in over the plantation, drenching everyone to the bone. Read More
Let us thirst again, we beg. It’s one of the few things we have left. Read More
On the surface, Last Action Hero seems to be an action-buddy comedy with a gimmick—enjoyable for its humor, action set pieces, and clever metafictional gags—but at bottom it is a trenchant critique of action movies, the model of exaggerated masculinity they promote, and the real-life violence they both reflect and project. Read More
Interview with the Vampire contains far more complex themes about human desires than initially meets the eye, and at the center of it all is Tom Cruise’s Lestat—the embodiment of a literal thirst trap, and a proud entry in the larger cinematic tradition of vampiric eroticism. Read More
The further we get from American Psycho’s release, the closer we get to the world it depicted. The satire becomes more pointed, but instead of being a fun indictment of the ‘80s, it becomes an unsettling reflection of the way we live now. Read More
Like amber traps a dragonfly, Saturday Night Fever catches, mid-flight, the moment of ‘70s zeitgeist that accommodated various—and conflicting—definitions of rape. Read More
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Featured Essays
The first act of Atonement (2007) takes place in the summer of 1935 in Shropshire, England, and this is the kind of heat that’ll drive you insane. Read More
A new crop of female auteurs is challenging The Male Gaze. Read More
In Phantom Thread, the concession of loving is not an ending, nor a triumph—it is a turn of the screw. Read More
I am five years old. Crisp white paper crinkles underneath me as I shift on the table. It is very cold and bright in the room, but I am sweaty.... Read More
It’s no wonder that the story of Don Quixote is so eternally alluring to filmmakers. What could be more relatable than a man who expends all his worldly energy willing his self-contained reality into existence? Read More
Obsessed with manifesting Sorcerer’s message on film, Friedkin failed to see he was living that very message during its sanity-snapping production: that which is behind us cannot be returned to. All one can do is persevere for as long as possible into the fates that our pasts have shaped for us. Read More
Inevitably, the breach comes. More humans are lost, doomed to roam the earth themselves, joining the ranks of the undead. If the worst predictions about the climate crisis come true, we will only have ourselves to blame. The zombies were once, after all, us. And we have destroyed ourselves. Read More
Fragmented, discontinuous, and piercingly personal, Cameraperson is a testament to what it means to be open and alive to the variegated voices of our world. Read More
Paradise Now provides humanity to the oppressed, even as years of continued violence chip away at their personhood, providing a defense of the disenfranchised and a portrait of damaged resilience that still remains incomparable nearly fifteen years later. Read More
Sometimes I think I have to stop believing in movies like October Sky. Read More
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Magnolia is messy, grandiose, ostentatious, overambitious, and overwhelming—or, in the words of its auteur “it’s too fucking long...it’s all just too fucking ‘too.’” It also happens to be my favorite film. Read More
The Return of the King is an object lesson in satisfying endings. Each one is necessary, a coda for an important story thread; each one folds in on the others like the pages of a book. Read More
In the images from Sátántangó that still cling to me, I see my mind’s selective memory: its search at work. How the memories of scenes become not a catalogue of the film, but another creation altogether. Read More
From the archives
2013-2019
Empire Records is not a movie about high school—it’s a fable about warding off the end of youth altogether. Read More
Simultaneously an unconsummated romance, aspirational Europorn, and a menopausal comedy of manners, Joanna Hogg's Unrelated is summer in a nutshell: bad feelings in good light. Read More
A sense of warring duality is everywhere in Princess Mononoke: selfishness and altruism, nature and humanity, life and death. Read More
In just under ten minutes of wordless story, Gabrielle Lissot’s Jukai shows us how our hardest-won lessons can become beams of light to illuminate the path forward for one another, and how even as the threads of our trauma form a tangle of sorrow, it’s a tangle that can be organized and reframed into our personal narrative, a story we can make use of to shelter and guide those that come after us. Read More
Inevitably, the breach comes. More humans are lost, doomed to roam the earth themselves, joining the ranks of the undead. If the worst predictions about the climate crisis come true, we will only have ourselves to blame. The zombies were once, after all, us. And we have destroyed ourselves. Read More
No one could say that Christine Chubbuck didn’t wish; if anything, she was undone by the fervency of her wishing. Read More
Paradise Now provides humanity to the oppressed, even as years of continued violence chip away at their personhood, providing a defense of the disenfranchised and a portrait of damaged resilience that still remains incomparable nearly fifteen years later. Read More
Every time I pick up one of Carrie Fisher's books, or turn on Postcards from the Edge, I remember that there are other people like me in this world, living weirdly, just trying to figure it out. Read More
Fragmented, discontinuous, and piercingly personal, Cameraperson is a testament to what it means to be open and alive to the variegated voices of our world. 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
Sometimes I think I have to stop believing in movies like October Sky. Read More
It’s no wonder that the story of Don Quixote is so eternally alluring to filmmakers. What could be more relatable than a man who expends all his worldly energy willing his self-contained reality into existence? Read More
Inherent Vice is a film that tricks us into settling in for a noir about a man solving a mystery, and instead presents us with a man confronting a melancholy truth: everything—lives, eras, and loves—comes to an end. Read More
On The Candidate, All the President's Men, The Post, and Vice. Read More