In The Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn pulls off an impressive trick: creating a character we struggle to identify with—who distances herself from others purposefully—but whom we can’t help rooting for anyway.
PositionSenior Editor
JoinedMay 27, 2017
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Top Gun: Maverick is not, at its heart, a story about what one man can achieve. Instead, it's an exploration of whether Man even matters.
No one really changes. But, Broadcast News asks, isn’t that kind of beautiful?
It’s a tricky thing to blend highly stylized artifice with real emotion, and perhaps David Lynch's Wild at Heart doesn’t always get it right. The attempt, though, is pure rock ‘n roll.
Other, more recent superhero films may claim to be grim—and certainly achieve a gritty, surface-level style—but in Batman Returns, we have something that seems to deliver an underbelly of actual darkness: upsettingly discolored bodily fluids, thrillingly unhealthy psychosexual games, raw fish, toxic sewage, and a semi-catatonic ‘hero’ who barely speaks.
American Gigolo helped create and define Richard Gere as an actor with uniquely chameleon sex appeal. But how?
If many of Steven Spielberg’s films are marathon novels, Duel is a sonnet—it has room to play because of its formal constraints.
You’ve seen the image online or you’ve seen it in your dreams. The gaping mouth, the white of the eyes. The finger pointing straight into the lens. The terrible moment of mirror revelation: I know what you are.
In 2020, Burn After Reading feels both more ridiculous and more painful than when it was first released—more capable of breaking down your defenses against laughter, and more likely to keep you up at night.
We are all slowly suffocating on the dust of this country, on the oxygen-less air of American exceptionalism. No one is coming to drill us out.
At their hearts, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood share a key notion: your greatest asset (some pun intended) too often ends up being your greatest curse.
t’s lowbrow. It’s juvenile. It’s crude; it’s course. It’s impulse, not intellect. It siphons its humor from someone else’s pain....
