Hud is a film with hard choices and few clear answers—and perhaps this ultimately accounts for its cult appeal among a youth culture who would soon usher in a morally ambiguous New Hollywood.
PositionEditor-at-Large
JoinedMay 27, 2017
Articles64
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Ethan Warren is an Editor-at-Large at Bright Wall/Dark Room. Under contract with Columbia University Press, he is currently working on his first book, The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson. A member of the Boston Society of Film Critics and a graduate of the master's program in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, he lives on the south shore of Boston with his wife, Caitlin, and their children.
All I can say for certain is that, for just under four minutes, Dan Deacon took me out of my mind.
For any theoretical questions concerning how to Sundance, I was more concerned with the question of why to Sundance. And the answer is: access to a week of new sensation and perception in the doldrums of mid-winter.
My unpopular opinion is that Wild Mountain Thyme is a transcendent work of art. Not from any objective standpoint, but rather from that of one particular head and heart: my own.
For the first time, Paul Thomas Anderson has produced a film distinguished not merely by his characteristic fascination with the world but by a deep love for it.
The web of influences upon Over the Garden Wall is vast, but everything coheres around a core of classical Americana, one rooted firmly in the northeast.
Almost Famous is not just a story about falling in love with life’s possibilities, nor is it just a story about falling in love with music; at its heart, Almost Famous is a film about falling in love with writing about music. It’s the story of how a boy became a critic.
It's the simple human lapses that embody the extraordinary effectiveness of no-budget documentary Hands on a Hardbody.
Two films featuring Michael Nyman's "Fish Beach" seem so utterly opposed that it’s hard to believe they could share anything at all, but a deeper shared resonance can be drawn out thanks to the particular ways that Nyman’s style of composition works upon picture and viewer.
With Southland Tales, Richard Kelly asked audiences to deal with the bleakest aspects of their current reality via a tonally ambiguous, hyper-taxing, incomplete narrative. When you look at it that way, even its sub-half-million box office take might sound high.
Tales of Beatrix Potter is a loose collection of concepts and elements that barely coheres, but manages to engage—and even delight—in spite of what should be overwhelming flaws.
The Straight Story represents the Lynchian world redeemed, a pocket of America that battled dread and violence and won, earning its just reward.
