For a story as doom-laden as Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight, the mere desire to do good—and do it the right way—must be hope enough. Read More
PositionSenior Editor
JoinedMay 27, 2017
Articles45
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Ethan Warren is the writer-director of the independent feature film West of Her. He lives on the south shore of Boston with his wife, Caitlin, and their children.
On Fantastic Mr. Fox and the contradictory, complementary visions of Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl. Read More
“It’s such a beautiful day,” my wife and I say each morning as we look out the sliding glass door onto the backyard, imbuing it with a weight and meaning we never have before, because it’s not the weather that matters so much as the freshness of the air. And, of course, we say it because there isn’t much else we can say now that isn’t tinged by either sorrow or fear. Read More
There’s a type of story I’ve come to recognize as my favorite: the ones that seem in the moment to be about small, even insubstantial, personal concerns yet reveal themselves immediately upon finishing to have conveyed something like the full enormity of what it means to be alive. Read More
Never have I encountered a more fascinating case of self-indulgence than the diptych of Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky, two films identical in plot but divergent in story, one chilly and distant and the other seeming to have been shot from inside the most passionate depths of the director’s soul. Read More
I frequently took my mental temperature after this year’s Sundance screenings, searching for symptoms of that dreaded ailment, festival fever. I’ve fought mightily to maintain critical detachment, but it bears acknowledgement that the following assessments were made during one of the most emotionally tumultuous weeks I can remember. Read More
There’s a question that has long been my personal riddle of the sphinx: what is “a Sundance movie”? Read More
The way we experience movies shapes the way we experience life, and to experience a movie like The Beach Bum, to ingest and absorb this much giddy existential gratitude, strikes at least this viewer as quite a blessing. Read More
Only one movie has ever managed to recreate that uniquely Dickens magic, achieving it not so much through adaptation as through transmutation. Read More
How a Comedy Central docuseries hosted by an unassuming weirdo rode a tidal wave of scams straight into the pantheon of the decade’s strangest and most significant art. Read More
Fargo is an outlier in the world of neo-noir, protecting its heroes by ending their stories and defiantly leaving their purity intact as though to prove that happy endings are possible. Read More
It would be natural to assume it’s impossible to recreate Harold Pinter’s effects on-screen. What cinematic setting could ever replicate the feeling of an ordinary space that simultaneously exists in a howling metaphysical void? Read More