Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano is told with magic and narrative uplifts that amount to miracles, surpassing documentary or reportage or neorealist cinema into something like a modern-day legend. It is storytelling that wants to take the journey further.
PositionFrequent Contributor
JoinedOctober 29, 2020
Articles12
Gummo is gross and soft-hearted and then cruel at every turn. We’re handed a grab bag of what Korine dares us to call perversions.
I didn’t exactly remember the story about Reality Winner. I recognized her uncanny name and its association with the word whistleblower. Whether I supported or condemned what she’d done had slipped through my memory. This lapse, an automatic deleting, made the story seem as though it may not have held much importance during the onslaught of news in 2017. Maybe the nation’s addled collective memory could stand to forget the answer to this particularly anxious American question: “What the hell happened here?”
Perhaps I can trace my steps backward and forward, anticipating and restoring the nostalgia, with a little less trepidation thanks to my early time spent with The Big Chill. By the time I reached my own cold fronts, I had the reminder that others had passed this way before.
Gelsomina exists both outside and inside the story, the glowing heart of Fellini's La Strada and an accompanying part of our viewing experience as she marvels at it with us.
On Chris Rock's Top Five and how difficult it can be to know exactly where the show ends and the reality begins.
L.A. Story is romantic, hopelessly. Our four lovestruck main characters fall in and out of their spells. The tone gets mushy. The freeway sign is embraced. The paradise could be believed.
The illusions of The French Dispatch are wondrous and sweet, and possibly vanishing. This singular setting and this singular filmmaker bolster one another, though, an inevitable convergence of two finely cultivated worlds—the outsider dream of France, and the extended universe of Wes Anderson.
It took a movie, not for the first or last time, to hoist my attention to broader ideas. At an evening showing of Nobody’s Fool, it occurred to me that I could become an old man.
With human activity suspended in 2020, nature re-emerged.
A tremor of vulnerability renewed itself as I sat down to watch The Elephant Man again. I wasn’t sure I could handle it. Am I resilient enough for this now? Am I finally old enough to see it?
French director Ladj Ly picks up Victor Hugo’s matters of poverty, injustice, and revolt and runs with them—far enough away to reclaim Les Misérables for a 21st century country.












