John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a masterpiece, not in spite of its messiness but rather because of it. Read More
PositionContributing Editor
JoinedJune 1, 2018
Articles15
A Journey Through The Funky Fanfare of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood Read More
Mikey and Nicky is not the story of two men attempting to escape the mob, nor two men reckoning with themselves—it's the story of two boys wholly unequipped to mediate the complex emotions and responsibilities of male adulthood. Read More
Breathless is at once a ferociously horny and formally audacious remake of Godard’s hyper-referential film, as well as an all-or-nothing, frenetically American and self-aware meditation on desperately empty people lost in the thrall of the pop culture that gives form to their wants and needs. Read More
Obsessed with manifesting Sorcerer’s message on film, Friedkin failed to see he was living that very message during its sanity-snapping production: that which is behind us cannot be returned to. All one can do is persevere for as long as possible into the fates that our pasts have shaped for us. Read More
Inherent Vice is a film that tricks us into settling in for a noir about a man solving a mystery, and instead presents us with a man confronting a melancholy truth: everything—lives, eras, and loves—comes to an end. Read More
A trio of 1994 Hollywood mainstream softcore films (Disclosure, Color of Night, and The Last Seduction) are each, in their own way, gripped with masculine fears concerning established sex and gender roles and the women who refuse to conform to them. Read More
Mandy is a visionary catalogue of the ways in which we attempt to survive, embrace, or succumb to the pain of living with death, and what happens when we lose the one thing that holds our world together. Read More
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a skin-flayed, nerve-burst confession, a self-loathing crucifixion of the kind of toxically hyper masculine pathology that poisoned Sam Peckinpah's personal life, but inspired his deliriously compelling art. Read More
Ingmar Bergman's second film is a tonally-daring Expressionist chiaroscuro of broken lives attempting to escape a rain-soaked nightworld of broken dreams. Read More
Based on John Cheever’s slippery fever dream of a short story, The Swimmer faithfully translates and expands Cheever’s 12 pages of suburban surrealism into a feature-length nightmare of masculine panic. Read More
Haunting and luminously textured, the haptic expressionism of You Were Never Really Here violently disrupts the pulp tropes that underpin the damaged-man-saves-helpless-girl movie. Read More