Nothing is ever quite settled in Martin Scorsese's After Hours, it's a cinematic maze that frequently dips its toes into the absurd and macabre. Read More
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On the journey to hell and back in The Crow. Read More
In many ways, Russian Doll feels like an extended exercise in cognitive therapy. Read More
Only Lovers Left Alive is about marriage, and about weathering long dark nights of the soul just long enough to see the light again, taking each wave as it comes and then bracing for the next one. Read More
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Featured Essays
Throughout their body of work, Powell and Pressburger return to the question of whether life and art can co-exist, and if the urge to live or the urge to create will win out in the end. Read More
Body Double is a dizzyingly perverse, pastel-hued celebration of cinematic pastiche and formalist trickery. Read More
A film as ambiguous as Barton Fink invites multiple readings. Read More
Vertigo is a film about fake female madness and real male madness. Read More
A quartet of true "Acid Westerns" (El Topo, Zachariah, Greaser's Palace, and Dead Man) wrestle with and adapt religious traditions, synthesizing the spirit of the Wild West with the spirit of 1960s psychedelic culture. Read More
When trying to sell someone on the merits of Under the Silver Lake, I tend to fall back on the same phrase: “It’s a movie that’s having a nervous breakdown.” Read More
In John Carpenter's three primary Los Angeles films—Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, and Escape from L.A.—he explores the degree to which paranoia is essential to the American way of life. Read More
In William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A., a quintessential Los Angeles crime thriller, artifice reigns, but so too does art. Read More
Hardcore, Paul Schrader’s sophomoric knockout, marked the end of an era—a final chapter in 1970s auteur cinema and the beginning of the slick, commercialized films that defined much of the 1980s. Read More
The exclusivity of that Los Angeles phenomenon—and the loneliness inherent within it—is the focus of writer-director Sofia Coppola’s only male-centered film, Somewhere. Read More
While Beginners and In a Lonely Place are radically different films, both portray their characters’ attempts to close the distance between themselves and others, drifting through chiasmatic stories from fear to delusion to fear again. Read More
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From the archives
2013-2019
By the end of the season I’m feeling not quite blue, but maybe a little silver, and I want to nestle into remembering that there is a fine tomorrow on its way no matter how dark today is. Read More
illustration by Sophia Foster-DiminoSometimes I look at the news and think the world is eating itself. It happens pretty often, but this year more than most. There’s been a lot of viciousness in the air, and little to feel enthused about. It’s the same old story, really. There are people with... Read More
The studied cool facades Hal Hartley’s characters put on, the way they almost play-act being criminals, the romantic fatalism that drives both the overarching narrative and the characters themselves: These are all elements that would make just as much sense in a Godard or Truffaut joint as they would in a ‘90s American indie film. Read More
In our apartments, we can let our guard down, be ourselves. How unnerving then, to realize you were never really safe there—that what you thought was a wall was a door all along. Read More
For all its silliness and strangeness and morally questionable underpinnings, Iron Man 3 offers less a manual on how to overcome trauma than a rough and complicated picture of what that might look like. Read More
Well before Christian Grey donned his dumb ripped jeans, James Spader embodied the paradigmatic combination of vulnerability and composure; his appeal, from Crash to Secretary, requires our conviction that he would, and would like to, and could, punish us—only gently. Read More
Breathless is at once a ferociously horny and formally audacious remake of Godard’s hyper-referential film, as well as an all-or-nothing, frenetically American and self-aware meditation on desperately empty people lost in the thrall of the pop culture that gives form to their wants and needs. Read More
We can’t all agree to keep the planet inhabitable, yet somehow we all agree about Dwayne Johnson. He’s a universal, human, humanist thirst trap—irresistible because he trades in things we can all agree on. Read More
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
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
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
Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is To the Wonder’s shadow, its doppelganger, its evil twin, and perhaps its better half. It’s Malick through the looking glass. Read More
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. Read More
Despite the widow’s omnipresence in society, she remains an object of dangerous fixation. Read More
Around the margins of their sales work, the mag crew in American Honey lives a hedonistic existence, chasing impulses and urges, expressing themselves physically when their verbal powers fail them. 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
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
Broadcast News presents adulthood as an exercise in weathering the relentless sensation of being not-quite-enough and not-quite-right. Read More