Nicholas Russell, Author at Bright Wall/Dark Room

The formal ambition of Steven Soderbergh's Presence ties into its awareness of and reverence for the narrative possibilities of the ghost story. Knowing that everything the audience sees is a product of an entity, the camera becomes not just an eye, but an entire being.

An image of Robert Downey Jr. as Harry Lockhart in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, drawn as though he's the author photo on a pulp detective novel

Black Christmas

Nicholas Russell·

Issue 136: Neo-Noir 2024

Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang isn’t a detective movie, though there are detectives, missing corpses, executive-level intrigue, and moonlit kidnappings—the starter kit for hard-boiled noir.

What You Do Not Bring Forth Will Destroy You: On M. Night Shyamalan & A Director’s Entanglements

Nicholas Russell·

New Releases

M. Night Shyamalan’s emotionally autofictional dramaturgies aren’t accidents. They’re records of the artist’s convictions—among other things, his waxing and waning belief in the goodness of others, and the ever-present dilemma of what one can, should, or might do when the outside world intrudes.

Trying To Be Cool: On Hit Man & Playing the Character

Nicholas Russell·

New Releases

For Richard Linklater, Hit Man is a genre exercise, or really, an exercise in the idea of genre—because, as the film repeatedly reminds you, it's more about perception and the malleability of identity than it is a true thriller.

Perihelion: On Adaptation, Obsession, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Nicholas Russell·

Issue 130: Obsession

Featuring, and about the dissection of, an overwhelming variety of details—expositional, aesthetic, sonic, motivational—David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo represents an unexpected, pulpy, intimate fusing of art and artist at grand scale.

Open Speculation: On Prometheus, The Martian, and Ridley Scott

Nicholas Russell·

Issue 128: Outer Space

Toss them up, and Prometheus and The Martian flip through the air and come back on the same coin. Exploration as a means of testing boundaries, of understanding the universe: a curiosity fetish, a humanism fetish, exploration to further ends, to exploit, to extract, to extend a domain, chaos, chaos, chaos.

Needles & Boxcutters

Nicholas Russell·

Issue 127: Best of 2023

More than any other film in 2023, Evil Dead Rise served as the most astute tribute to the democratic, unfussy glory of the cinema experience, one of those true communal events that are so often fetishized yet elusive.

Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese on the set of Killers of the Flower Moon

Trace Element: Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Nicholas Russell·

New Releases

It’s the purview of art, of good art, to move. To move emotionally, intellectually, to move with or against the moment in which it’s found. It’s also the purview of the critical observer to take on whatever totality of context and understanding about the art and artist they already retain, or accumulate and decide for themselves what the work means, if it happens to mean anything.

Killing Time: 3:10 to Yuma & the Lonesome West

Nicholas Russell·

Issue 124: Westerns

At the core of every version of 3:10 to Yuma is a demand for payment for services rendered. America’s westward expansion—the dream of untouched and verdant plains—couldn’t outpace capitalism.

In an image from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, two men fight on top of a speeding train. The man on the right is dressed in black and seems to be pushing the man on the left, dressed in a tan jacket and dark pants, off the edge of the top of the train.

About Face: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One & The Selling of Tom Cruise

Nicholas Russell·

Issue 122: Heists New Releases

Ethan Hunt has been engineered as Cruise’s go-to export, the slippage between character and actor deliberate; Hunt is the closest an audience gets to seeing Cruise act like a normal person.

Prosopagnosia: On Skinamarink and the Distortions of Fear

Nicholas Russell·

Extras

Skinamarink presents a case of found memory, the scratches and wear of time on one’s recollection disfiguring—yet never wholly obscuring—foundational apprehensions.