When I watch My Own Private Idaho I feel a profound nostalgia for the person I was, for the city I loved.
The core of Purple Rain lies in the psychological lives of Black men. What makes the film revolutionary, besides its sympathetic gaze, is that it positions music as a vehicle for redemption.
Crafted as though from everyday observation and fantastic dream, About Endlessness marries the magical and mercurial, the simple and surreal.
There were days where I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be able to sit with loved ones and share these first-time viewings in real time, and others when the combination of quarantine cabin fever and less-than-stellar runs of films made it seem like everything would be mediocre. A privilege and, 32 movies, shorts, and episodes later, a pile-up.
An Unmarried Woman, 20th Century Women, Freaks & Geeks, and the malaise of being an American woman during the Carter era.
NASA made the Mercury Seven men into a myth. Tom Wolfe made them into (slightly flawed) idols. Philip Kaufman makes them the prototypes of all the insouciant heroes of the Reagan era, who reinforce the American status quo while still breaking every rule.
If there was any tangible loss in a virtual Sundance, it wasn’t the loss of celebrity sightings and frostbitten extremities; it was the loss of a shared narrative on what the week had provided.
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?
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of You Can Count on Me's release, Kenneth Lonergan sits down to talk at length about the experience of making his first movie.
It’s easy to write off a movie like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so married as it is to the neon tackiness of the early 1990s; it’s much harder to recognize that placing itself squarely into that context is an extraordinary device.
After flopping at the box office in February 2000, the dramedy was re-released in November of the same year—and flopped again. But it grossed my heart.
Tim Burton’s most lauded films are famously full of death. But they’re also full of would-be ghosts, characters who linger in the margins of living.