Over its two seasons, Patriot traces that meteoric descent with a humanist’s touch, turning international espionage into quotidian drama and grounding the global politics of nuclear armament in the mundane specifics of industrial piping workplaces and father-son dynamics.
"I think this is a thing that will not change in whatever I’m lucky enough to make in the future: a constant prioritizing of the pleasure principle. In some ways, it’s why I’m not the primary audience for contemporary American independent film. There’s a sort of gritty American naturalism that lacks an engagement with desire. I lament the moving away from sensual pleasures in cinema."
There’s a genuine sadness hiding in the escapades and exuberance of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, an awareness that this, like everything else, will all come to an end.
This is the Chicago that The Weather Man knows: a city trapped between coasts, haunted by its reputation, growing all the more faceless as it edges its way through the new millennium.
“What came first, the music or the misery?” Watching High Fidelity now, twenty-odd years later, the question shifted: which came first, my own vision for my future self or the film's vision?
While You Were Sleeping (1995) is a great romantic comedy, but it's also a love letter to Chicago in the winter.
Whether or not he haunts the theater at 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue in Chicago is up for debate, but what’s certain is that John Dillinger has haunted 90 years of American cinema.
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Featured Essays
from the archives (2013 - 2023)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think of sunlight when I think of Westerns. What strikes me about The Furies (1950) is that it’s shrouded in darkness.