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.
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My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a film about realizing that a large, unwieldy, meddling family can be the best and worst thing in your life.
The Other Side of the Wind became a sprawling, uncontainable, years-long odyssey into Orson Welles’s relationship with betrayal, his standing in the world, and his own self.
Andrew Ahn’s Driveways is a difficult film to pin down, precisely because there’s so little in it to process, demystify, or explain. There are no set pieces or battle scenes, no dramatic plot twists or betrayals. Instead, it captures life in its simplest, most ordinary forms.
The viewer emerges from Fellini Satyricon in a queasy stupor, their mind grasping at individual images, even as they push the whole experience away.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the franchise’s definitive encapsulation of its own generational impact, and a bridge between generations of moviegoers.
Like a Peter Singer thought experiment on meth, Mom and Dad takes the impersonal violence of policy, and the slow violence of eco-catastrophe, and literalizes them within the home.
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To watch Blow Out is to watch an artist confronting his deepest fears using the techniques and technology of the medium that had previously offered him salvation. That artist is John Travolta's Jack Terry. That artist is also Brian De Palma.
Moving between the universal and the specific, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life builds an ethereal, impressionistic sense of time that ebbs and flows like a memory or a dream.
This is the story of Gawain: crashing through in-progress myths that don’t belong to him, brushing against gods. This is the story of Gawain, stumbling through the forest, his soul bared, searching: For himself, sure, but most importantly, for his legend.
When I recommend Hubie Halloween to you rabidly and over-zealously, when I hum with the sweet shocked shout of an Almond Joy with two almonds, what I mean is: at our most puerile and sensitive and fearful we are just as deserving of care as anybody else. Will you remember that?
October marks the 100th issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room, and we're observing that milestone by talking our way through a longtime staff favorite, the revisionist rom-com Sleeping With Other People.
I love The Fits not because it’s an entertaining film, but because it is a mystery and a revelation which continues to teach me how to see.
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Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a skin-flayed, nerve-burst confession, a self-loathing crucifixion of the kind of hyper masculine pathology that poisoned Peckinpah's personal life, but inspired his deliriously compelling art.
Arrival purports to have a circular structure itself, through the use of flashbacks and forwards, but subsequent viewings reveal it to be linear by way of a palindrome.
A Journey Through The Funky Fanfare of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
First Reformed and The Good Lord Bird can best be linked by a common, disheartening truth: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
If anything, Charade is a screwball thriller—and surely the best movie that Howard Hawks never made.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a film about realizing that a large, unwieldy, meddling family can be the best and worst thing in your life.
To watch Blow Out is to watch an artist confronting his deepest fears using the techniques and technology of the medium that had previously offered him salvation. That artist is John Travolta's Jack Terry. That artist is also Brian De Palma.
When I recommend Hubie Halloween to you rabidly and over-zealously, when I hum with the sweet shocked shout of an Almond Joy with two almonds, what I mean is: at our most puerile and sensitive and fearful we are just as deserving of care as anybody else. Will you remember that?
As I walked up the steps to the Walter Reade theater, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of triumph, my first day back on campus. Everyone was there! In line, tired, clutching cheap coffee and festival badges. Some people got haircuts. Even the grumps were buzzing, happy to finally have some place to be.
It took a movie, not for the first or last time, to hoist my attention to broader ideas. At an evening showing of Nobody’s Fool, it occurred to me that I could become an old man.
Moving between the universal and the specific, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life builds an ethereal, impressionistic sense of time that ebbs and flows like a memory or a dream.
October marks the 100th issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room, and we're observing that milestone by talking our way through a longtime staff favorite, the revisionist rom-com Sleeping With Other People.
Our son watches more television than we’d planned; one of the many side effects of living in pandemic times. Coming from a media background in criticism and textual analysis, children’s entertainment drove me insane, but one day, something cracked open.
On a plot level, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is about Indy saving his father. But on an emotional level, it is about Indy learning how to love his father, to accept his father’s guidance, and to discover how much his father already loves him.
This is the story of Gawain: crashing through in-progress myths that don’t belong to him, brushing against gods. This is the story of Gawain, stumbling through the forest, his soul bared, searching: For himself, sure, but most importantly, for his legend.
I love The Fits not because it’s an entertaining film, but because it is a mystery and a revelation which continues to teach me how to see.
As hyperreal as Schrödinger’s cat, the Driver glitches through a series of archetypes, and Drive itself escapes characterization as easily as he escapes his various pursuers.
