Mikey and Nicky is not the story of two men attempting to escape the mob, nor two men reckoning with themselves—it's the story of two boys wholly unequipped to mediate the complex emotions and responsibilities of male adulthood. Read More
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What does it mean to look at women through the eyes of a male protagonist in the three films Elaine May directed in the '70s? Read More
The Heartbreak Kid as Elaine May’s Master Class. Read More
For all of A New Leaf's atonal humor and surrealism, Elaine May still manages to depict marriage in a bleakly true light: as a continual, if cordial, blind date. Read More
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Featured Essays
As a narrative, Kieślowski's Red is often recursively and sometimes even reflexively understood. It’s a film of ellipses, of threads dropped and picked up until, suddenly, they are woven. Read More
Explaining Dr. No to my newborn daughter made me feel alive, present, conscious of the sweep of time. Read More
To talk about 12 Years a Slave is to talk about how much history has failed us, and we it. Read More
On the journey to hell and back in The Crow. Read More
The Warriors is about living with—through, during—the night, a lesson we all learn as kids, and carry with us as we sleep. It’s not so much about the fear of what’s behind, but about running as fast as possible toward what’s on the other side. Read More
Watching The World’s End today, separated from my first viewing by six years that feel more like a lifetime, I don’t see a thrilling and heart-wrenching story. Instead, I see one that’s profoundly sad. 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
What if, Clue seems to ask, futility isn’t an Achilles’ heel—what if it’s the point? Read More
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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From the archives
2013-2019
"Don’t mind the cameras till you to talk to them." Read More
We lose nothing from a fuller representation of what it means to be human; we gain everything from a more empathetic understanding of our friends. 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
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
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
By transposing Raymond Carver’s stories to Los Angeles, Robert Altman's Short Cuts fashions a narrative that is less about the Los Angeles of our collective imagination and more about the real LA most of us don’t care to know. 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
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
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 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
By transposing Raymond Carver’s stories to Los Angeles, Robert Altman's Short Cuts fashions a narrative that is less about the Los Angeles of our collective imagination and more about the real LA most of us don’t care to know. 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
In Room 140, director Priscilla González Sainz supports her subjects with an unobtrusive and subtly compassionate eye, creating a vital work of art and an essential activist document. 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
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