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.
PositionSenior Editor
JoinedMay 27, 2017
Articles66
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Ethan Warren is Senior Editor 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.
The Straight Story represents the Lynchian world redeemed, a pocket of America that battled dread and violence and won, earning its just reward.
If there was any tangible loss in a virtual Sundance, it wasn’t the loss of celebrity sightings and frostbitten extremities; it was the loss of a shared narrative on what the week had provided.
If anything unites Gene Kelly's classic musicals, it’s a belief that no past experience could be horrific enough to prevent you from letting loose that whole-human-race encompassing smile and falling in love with life all over again.
In the soft focus of his gaze, Costner shows us a man seeing his own life superimposed onto itself, the uncanny vertiginous struggle to reconcile your existence as someone’s child with your existence as someone’s parent, the effort to locate your own life through triangulation between lives spent and lives just beginning to unfold.
In describing Cooper Raiff’s emergence onto the independent film scene, it’s easy to lean on what sounds like a novelty hook: at just 23 years old, he’s written, directed, starred in, and co-edited a college-set romcom that went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at South by Southwest.
Three seemingly dissimilar works are united by three seemingly diffuse concepts that all lead back to the same place: the unique capacity of film to evoke some of the mind’s most indescribable sensations.
On Knuckle Sandwich, the Paul Thomas Anderson movie that wasn’t.
I felt drawn to Stand by Me in a way I had never been drawn to a movie before, longing each day to reimmerse myself in this soft-focused sun-dappled boy’s idyll. But still I wonder: what parts of me did this movie speak to?
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.
On Fantastic Mr. Fox and the contradictory, complementary visions of Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl.
“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.
