This is where humiliation lives: in the gap between the self we want to be and the self we actually are. Read More
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As much as The Miseducation of Cameron Post is about finding salvation within one’s self, it is also about finding hope and protection in the arms of a chosen family. Read More
It's hard to know whether The Mule will be Clint Eastwood’s final film, either in front of or behind the camera—but it sure feels like it. Read More
On the one hand, everything we do may be meaningless. Oblivion may be the only truth. But on the other, maybe it’s exactly this ultimate despair that makes our all our everyday actions essential. Read More
A mid-winter love affair feels decadent but also rather necessary, and Cold War rewards like a hot chocolate spiked with brandy: warming, bracing, to be savored. Read More
This scream is a scream of defiance. Read More
The cinematic alchemy of Burning transforms an abstract theory of liminality into something that an audience can feel in the pulse of every scene and then, perhaps, in their own world. Read More
Featured Essays
Explaining Dr. No to my newborn daughter made me feel alive, present, conscious of the sweep of time. Read More
On Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Chinatown, and the battle for L.A.’s soul. Read More
On Upstream Color: I see you. Do you see me. Read More
What Richard Linklater captures in Boyhood is not the story of a boy growing up, but boyhood as identity—the edification of one small American dream. Read More
Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War trilogy (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth) helped shape America’s collective memory of the Vietnam War at a crucial moment. Read More
Extras
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Loving My Best Friend’s Wedding doesn’t necessarily mean loving all of it, and yet, here I am saying I do. Read More
Bread may not be an explicitly feminist film in the way that we understand that today, but what remains still speaks to where we’ve come from, and where we still need to go. Read More
Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman works as a time capsule for a specific era and place, preserving the image of Taiwan—a picture of prosperity and encroaching Western influence—as it hurtled toward the 21st century. Read More
November 2018
Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf is the story of a marriage crumbling in a void. Read More
In Bergman's work, boats tend to function as the escape hatch that is never opened, the getaway car that is never put into drive, the dream that, were it to actually set sail, would capsize under the weight of the gilded burden of escapism. Read More
The stories we encounter as children never quite leave us; they shape and color everything that comes afterward. Read More
From the archives
2013-2018
Add a little eggnog to that rum. Settle in to your corner of the couch. Turn on the flatscreen. Refer to this guide to made-for-television holiday films. Read More
Sharp Objects is a slow-burning gothic horror about rage and shame and grief, one that explores—in meticulous, at times uncomfortable detail—what it feels like to live in both the midst and the aftermath of trauma. Read More
In the early 1990s, Al Pacino began a project that would span years and continents; a multi-level documentary chronicling his attempt to understand and convey how he felt about Shakespeare’s Richard III. Read More
In Howl’s Moving Castle, food is more than just a necessity—it sustains life, in every sense of the phrase: helping a body hold skin and sinew together, while acting as an expression of love and care. Read More
The meals in Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child and Landline are not extravagant as dining experiences, but they are meaningful as relational ones: small, comforting rituals that provide a moment of constancy amidst chaos. Read More
Bruno Bozzetto’s version of evolution in Allegro Non Troppo is a death march—a story of food chasing food. Read More
Both visually and textually, Cries and Whispers is concerned with exteriors and interiors, with surfaces and what seethes beneath them. Read More
Harriet Andersson’s contributions to Bergman’s oeuvre cannot be understated—her fearlessness about her body within a performance allowed her to create something both fierce and distinctive. Read More
What Persona produces, onscreen and in its critics, is more than the sum of its narrative parts. Read More
The stories we encounter as children never quite leave us; they shape and color everything that comes afterward. Read More
On the twisted war of influence in Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite. Read More
In Bergman's work, boats tend to function as the escape hatch that is never opened, the getaway car that is never put into drive, the dream that, were it to actually set sail, would capsize under the weight of the gilded burden of escapism. Read More
Ingmar Bergman's second film is a tonally-daring Expressionist chiaroscuro of broken lives attempting to escape a rain-soaked nightworld of broken dreams. Read More
As a play, a film, and a television series, Scenes from a Marriage examines a relationship in brutally exacting, loving detail. Read More