On paper, Red Rooms is the ideal horror movie for a person like me, which is to say, a coward. It would be a misnomer to say Pascal Plante’s film has no violence though—it is violence, a bloodless film that is rich with blood.
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JoinedMay 27, 2017
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I approached Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Wicked with skepticism. Were we really doing this all over again? Was I still being asked to take this bizarre Wizard of Oz-inspired, anti-fascist fanfiction seriously? Those answers soon became irrelevant. Thirty minutes into the film, I leaned over to my friend and said: “I’m kind of loving this.”
Fran Hoepfner reports on her sixth New York Film Festival, with thoughts on Megalopolis, The Shrouds, The Room Next Door, Nickel Boys, Oh, Canada, Queer, Hard Truths, Rumours, A Real Pain, Grand Tour, Caught by the Tides, and more!
That Noah Baumbach's Mistress America is set in New York City is not in and of itself remarkable; New York City is the setting of a number of films. What’s remarkable is that it's set in Brooke’s New York—the New York of fiction and exaggeration, of bizarre anecdotes and urban legend, of viral tweets and collective myth.
After a run of crummy films about “age gap relationships," what a relief it is to see Between the Temples, a film whose maybe-lovers seem to be overwhelmed by their affection for one another.
I spent much of Furiosa wondering why this film existed—less “who is this for?” and more “why is this here?” The answer that emerged over the course of viewing, considering, and then rewatching Fury Road was that of character, not of plot—Furiosa exists to show us how a drive for revenge can turn into a drive for redemption.
Perhaps this is the hidden genius of something like Michael Showalter's The Idea of You, situated neatly in the title of the film itself: nothing is ever as good as the concept of something is.
In Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Dickie doesn’t love Marge. Or at least, Dickie doesn’t say he loves Marge. In Anthony Minghella’s film of the same name, Marge is loved—maybe, probably, or at least she believes herself to be loved.
Tran Anh Hung’s new film, The Taste of Things, is about cooking—as gesture, as labor, as love, as skill.
La Chimera feels like a dream, talking to and over and under my sense of understanding. It feels like I made it up. It was the film of my year—the year when there was so much lost.
Like all the best Michael Mann films, Ferrari moved me in a way I find impossible to describe. The tragedy of it all is so obvious: do not think that I weep for a car company’s founder so much as I do for the pain of ambition.
If Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is about anything other than its star, it's about the sheer labor involved in putting on such a production.