On queerness, fate, and adaptation as tragedy in Jesus Christ Superstar.
"All of life's riddles are answered in the movies." —Steve Martin, Grand Canyon
I told the almost comically friendly customs agent that I’m in Canada for business and not pleasure, so in the interest of not getting apprehended by the mounties, my top priority remains the almighty cinema.
Critics and fans have accurately described Hustlers as a bedazzled Recession-era period piece. But the movie is equally specific to our times, the first in Hollywood history to produce movie after movie about ordinary(ish) women doing crimes.
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.
Bright Wall/Dark Room spoke with James Bird about families – real, fictional, natural and otherwise.
Here is what happens when you let the darkness win.
"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.
Ashley M. Pérez García on watching Songs from the Second Floor from Puerto Rico, in the aftermath of Hurricane María.
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.
In Station Eleven, art brings people together, pushes them apart, makes them angry, and makes them whole.
There’s a type of story I’ve come to recognize as my favorite: the ones that seem in the moment to be about small, even insubstantial, personal concerns yet reveal themselves immediately upon finishing to have conveyed something like the full enormity of what it means to be alive.
