Once upon a time they did make movies about us, and they starred Diane Lane. In 2002, at age 36, she played Connie in Unfaithful, and in 2003, at 37, she played Frances in Under the Tuscan Sun. Movies—and characters—that, until recent rewatches, I never saw as the siblings they are: Two married women whose lives come to a head, and the different paths they take toward discovery. One is about ripping it all apart, the other about building it all back up.
PositionFrequent Contributor
JoinedMay 28, 2017
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Lindsey Romain is a writer living in Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Vulture, RogerEbert.com, and Fangoria. She likes antiques, David Lynch, and naps on her porch. She spends most of her time messing up recipes and spoiling her two very large cats.
For most of Spielberg’s career, science fiction has been the mechanism through which he learns and teaches empathy. But in Disclosure Day, empathy itself is the speculative leap. The genre function is inverted: science fiction stops speculating about aliens and starts speculating about us. Aliens are ordinary. Human compassion is extraordinary. The sci-fi is us.
Watching All the President’s Men in 2026 provokes a gentle aching because it documents an ecosystem of institutional faith that no longer exists—that truth, once uncovered, possesses the power to shift the world.
So much of Rachel Getting Married is about these needle-fine moments of grace and clemency. Many great directors find truth in skepticism, but Jonathan Demme often found it in the sparseness of in-betweens.
Opening Night was John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands' sixth collaboration. Two disruptors tearing down the walls of an establishment to forge a different kind of accepted entertainment, free from the bars of script, transmutable to those changed by it. A shedding of costume.
Barbie is not entirely a musical. It’s more a patchwork quilt of influence: the scuttlebutt dialogue of Hawks, the quiet sensuality of Almodóvar, the transient yearning of Wenders. But it’s the musicality that brings it to life—that pours soul into Barbie’s plastic limbs.
On Popcorn, meta-horror, film fanaticism, Dante, love, and loss of identity.
Removed from the impossible tangle of time travel, Donnie Darko is really just a mood.
Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is a a true musical, with brass-cracking orchestration; colors so anodyne they whisper, so blaring they shout; voices that soar and temporize and stay. Within seconds, it necessitates its own existence.
Euphoria is glimpsed through Rue’s wide eyes and is precise in how it captures a mind discombobulated by loss.
Every time I pick up one of Carrie Fisher's books, or turn on Postcards from the Edge, I remember that there are other people like me in this world, living weirdly, just trying to figure it out.
Here is what happens when you let the darkness win.












