The now of Joan Micklin Silver’s 1977 masterpiece Between the Lines is a major concern for the characters. What is this generation’s identity now, another decade into adulthood and another decade removed from the days in which they believed they might actually change the world?
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Ethan Warren has been contributing to Bright Wall/Dark Room since 2016. His first book, The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, was published in April 2023 by Wallflower Books, a division of Columbia University Press. A member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, he lives on the south shore of Boston with his wife, Caitlin, and their children.
C’mon C’mon isn’t necessarily about making the world as a whole comprehensible to a child. It’s about grappling with how comprehensible to make one key fact: his mom isn’t with him because his dad is having a manic episode.
Monte Hellman's The Shooting offers a clear and present microcosm for the world’s unknowable hostility.
In their myriad crime stories, the Coens have tended to take a fatalistic perspective. And then there is the strange case of Raising Arizona's H.I. McDunnough.
A movie as dense and deep as Adaptation offers a communal awakening, one that ideally leads to new insights on the human capacity for thought and emotion.
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.
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.