Once I noticed the Kimberlys in Nora Ephron’s work, I couldn’t stop noticing them. If we’re accepting Ephron’s own assertion that real-life hurt and heartbreak can be put into fiction with impunity, what did she have against some woman named Kimberly?
"Based on an actual lie.” That’s how Lulu Wang’s new film The Farewell starts out, before China-born, U.S.-raised Billi (Awkwafina) returns to Changchun as her family prepares to say goodbye to their matriarch Nai Nai, who’s been diagnosed with cancer.
The one catch: Nai Nai doesn’t know she’s sick.
An interview with Matt Zoller Seitz
An interview with Alissa Wilkinson
I’ve seen Drive My Car four times now, and with each viewing, smaller and smaller details have brought me to the verge of tears.
It's hard to watch Annihilation in a Chicago winter and not feel it on a molecular level.
"It’s a super testosteroney movie—a bunch of men, a lot of violence, the cops are dudes, the guys in the neighborhoods are dudes. But no one was looking at this with empathy, like, “What does it mean to be a human being living in this space?” To me that was a very female gaze, though the movie wasn’t about women."
Here is what happens when you let the darkness win.
"The fact is that these final years of Nico’s life were arguably the best years because she was much more in control, she was happy, and she had her band."
"You know how, in therapy, you realize something was the cause of something else? This film was like natural therapy for me. I started thinking, 'What else do I remember about the one-child policy, and how did it affect me?'"
In Station Eleven, art brings people together, pushes them apart, makes them angry, and makes them whole.
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.