The interplay between evidence and absence is a powerful, often invisible force in Satyajit Ray’s deceptively simple Days and Nights In the Forest (1970). The film’s ostensible small-scale neorealist drama contains a whole internal cosmology of four middle-aged men in crisis, where the black holes of negative space exert the same gravitational power as the stars themselves.
PositionFrequent Contributor
JoinedNovember 14, 2023
Articles11
Bryan Miller was an alt-weekly film critic for 20 years, first for the Nightlife and then for City Pages. His fiction has appeared on the Drabblecast and in the Bombay Literary Magazine, in Shadowy Natures, the Monsters We Forgot, and several other anthologies and journals. He’s also a standup comic who has been featured on the CBS Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and on Drybar Comedy. He lives in Minneapolis, where he is probably watching a movie right now.
What I’ve grown to appreciate is that Superman II is really a movie about the necessity of Superman as an American myth—about the very meaning of Superman.
Can Carrie White simultaneously be the hero and the monster? The clues lie in what has been jettisoned in an otherwise faithful adaptation from page to screen. By removing the conventional protagonist, the adaptation takes on ominous new implications and truly becomes a Brian De Palma film.
The Spook Who Sat By the Door is a pipe bomb on the video store shelf, a gasoline-filled wine bottle in your DVD cabinet, a vicious bit of malware streamed through hijacked plutocrat satellites.
Melvin and Howard would be a curiosity in Jonathan Demme’s filmography if not for the fact that his entire filmography is a collection of curiosities.
Taken together, the first three films from pioneering feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris—A Question Of Silence, Broken Mirrors, and The Last Island—form a scathing indictment of not just any particular society but the very idea of society, observed with the chilly detachment of someone who’s surprised that you’re surprised.
The Thin Man created a truly equal romantic partnership that was neither stumbling toward matrimony nor frustrated by its restraints, a portrait of a thoroughly modern marriage so ahead of its time you can hardly believe it's nearing its centennial anniversary.
The apotheosis of mutiny movies also happens to be the rip-roaring coolest of the bunch, a piece of pure pop entertainment that—much like its director, Tony Scott—is due for reconsideration.
Plenty of movies—most movies, in fact—are about obsession. Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens poses an unsettling question that defies one of the most deeply ingrained conventions of cinema: what if having nothing to obsess over is vastly more painful than unrequited fixation?
It’s A Wonderful Life is rich in the purest sense of the word because it is so many things—a romantic drama, a capitalist critique, an existential crisis, a chronicle of 20th century American history—but more than anything else, it’s one of the all-time great Dad movies. It’s a movie about the absence of your father.
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.











