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Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese on the set of Killers of the Flower Moon

Trace Element: Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

It’s the purview of art, of good art, to move. To move emotionally, intellectually, to move with or against the moment in which it’s found. It’s also the purview of the critical observer to take on whatever totality of context and understanding about the art and artist they already retain, or accumulate and decide for themselves what the work means, if it happens to mean anything.

Issue 124: Westerns

October 2023

For Two Songs in a Row: Some Notes on the Profundity of Rio Bravo

Ethan Warren·

Issue 124: Westerns

Like so many good Westerns, Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo feels like a novel I want to forever have a bookmark in: ready to pick up and enjoy, with a few passages left for next time.

Towards the Afropastoral: What Nope Says About the Black Western

Celia Mattison·

Issue 124: Westerns

Jordan Peele's Nope refashions the Western as a genre that tells a story of American erasure by its survivors. Peele pays tribute to the forgotten subject of Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic print by reimagining a bespoke legacy: the rider receives not only a name and a backstory—he also gets a future.

Episode #34: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman·

Issue 124: Westerns Podcast

This month, author and Cinephile: A Card Game creator Cory Everett joins us to talk about Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). We get into the elasticity of the Western, what constitutes pure cinéma, Claudia Cardinale thirst, Big Screen Movies and the garages that screen them, Leone the minimalist and maximalist, and more.

What’s Wrong with a Cowboy in Hamburg? In Search of an American Friend

Benjamin Page·

Issue 124: Westerns

Wim Wenders's The American Friend isn’t a Western in the strictest sense, but the obsession of its central antagonist with “the cowboy,” that myth of masculine exceptionalism, is both an attempt to claw his way out of loneliness, and a core reason for why he remains, in fact, so achingly alone.

Hollywood’s Last Cowboy

Matthew Germenis·

Issue 124: Westerns

What do Calvin Candie, Hugh Glass, and Rick Dalton tell us about Leonardo DiCaprio as an artist—and what do these characters tell us about American history and its myths?

A Hatred That IS, A World That IS

Andrew Rostan·

Issue 124: Westerns

I think of sunlight when I think of Westerns. What strikes me about The Furies (1950) is that it’s shrouded in darkness.

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Issue 123: Nostalgia

September 2023

News From Home: Ode To The Death And Life Of One Great American City

Dylan Fugel·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

News from Home reminds us that film, as an art form, is only capable of reconstructing, re-making paths that have already been trod, of showing scars but not soothing the wound, of hearing from home but being unable to change the fact that it took you a long time to come back.

The Alternative Press

Ethan Warren·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

The now of Joan Micklin Silver’s 1977 masterpiece Between the Lines is a major concern for the characters. What is this generation’s identity now, another decade into adulthood and another decade removed from the days in which they believed they might actually change the world?

An Audrey Girl

Carrie Courogen·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

The older I get, the more I find myself impressed by Audrey Hepburn as an actor who was great in spite of her packaging; by the evolution of her raw and untrained talent over the span of her relatively short career; and most of all, by the undeniably prickly undercurrent of her most iconic films.

John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in a scene from The Quiet Man (1952) | Republic Pictures

I Know Your People, Sean

Ciara Moloney·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

Irish people lay claim to and celebrate The Quiet Man—there’s a whole museum in the village where it was filmed—but just as often, we cringe away from it, anxiously imagining that this is how Americans see us. But the truth is, The Quiet Man is a much bigger deal to us than it could ever be to them.

Can’t Remember to Forget You: Memento in Twenty Fragments

Abigail Oswald·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

Memento is not an exact mirror of Leonard’s lived experience, but its structure forces the viewer to confront the ephemerality of memory on a loop, just as he does. The constant losing battle of trying to hold on to distinct moments, even as they slip beyond our reach.

As Much As I’d Like to Stay

Nathaniel Missildine·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

Perhaps I can trace my steps backward and forward, anticipating and restoring the nostalgia, with a little less trepidation thanks to my early time spent with The Big Chill. By the time I reached my own cold fronts, I had the reminder that others had passed this way before.

An illustration of Speed Racer in a car, white helmet on, looking intense.

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