On Knuckle Sandwich, the Paul Thomas Anderson Movie That Wasn’t.
PositionSenior Editor
JoinedMay 27, 2017
Articles59
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Ethan Warren is a senior editor for 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a question that has long been my personal riddle of the sphinx: what is “a Sundance movie”?
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.
Only one movie has ever managed to recreate that uniquely Dickens magic, achieving it not so much through adaptation as through transmutation.
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.
