On Kogonada’s After Yang and its depiction of grief, love, belonging, and the lovely, wounding ache of memory.
PositionStaff Writer
JoinedMay 28, 2017
Articles28
Sarah Welch-Larson writes about feminist theology, sad men in space, and stories about creation and agency. She is a member of Chicago Indie Critics, the cohost of Seeing and Believing podcast, and the author of Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction's Most Idiosyncratic Franchise, now available from Cascade Books. She lives in Chicago with her husband, their dog, and about three dozen houseplants.
Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark bites into the myth of American individualism and exceptionalism in Western movies by throwing vampires into the mix.
It’s no secret that Drew Goddard is interested in stories about characters watching and being watched by other people. Bad Times at the El Royale takes this fascination and folds it into the very walls of the titular hotel.
Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise is decadence splashed on celluloid, a celebration of the shine of glam rock, and a preemptive funeral for the scene officiated by the dark underside of the business.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is a self-fulfilling prophecy that undoes itself in the telling, an ouroboros regurgitating its own tail rather than eating it.
Frankenstein rests in the meeting place where the borders between transgression and transcendence touch.
Stop Making Sense is a beautiful magic trick: show the stage for the hard concrete reality it is, then transform it into an island of motion and movement that’s unreal and exaggerated.
The Empire Strikes Back is about doing the work after all passion for that work is gone, about the slow, hard attempts to see a long-term plan through with no hope of success in sight.
The tension Michael Mann’s Collateral sustains is effective because the movie understands the unequal relationship between employer and employee, between driver and passenger.
In this single shot, The Hunt for Red October presents its stakes: the struggle between an individual and the vast and powerful forces that threaten to swallow him.
Alien: Resurrection swings the pendulum away from the dour grimness of its predecessor towards a sense of humor and ironic self-awareness; the result is an Alien eager to thumb its nose at its precursors. It doesn’t care if anyone who loves those earlier films gets caught in the crossfire, either.
Anxiety is Fury Road’s strongest throughline: the beating heart at its center.
