On a plot level, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is about Indy saving his father. But on an emotional level, it is about Indy learning how to love his father, to accept his father’s guidance, and to discover how much his father already loves him.
The Other Side of the Wind became a sprawling, uncontainable, years-long odyssey into Orson Welles’s relationship with betrayal, his standing in the world, and his own self.
The appeal of The Real Housewives of New York City is that it’s an environment in which rare depictions of the knotty, strange inner lives of adult women and standard-issue, heavily produced reality TV antics coexist in perfect harmony, where novelistic character development and cheap episodic entertainment take on a symbiotic relationship.
Andrew Ahn’s Driveways is a difficult film to pin down, precisely because there’s so little in it to process, demystify, or explain. There are no set pieces or battle scenes, no dramatic plot twists or betrayals. Instead, it captures life in its simplest, most ordinary forms.
Watching Jauja so far from home, I felt the protagonist and I asking the same questions about fatherhood, sharing the same anxieties about raising a child in ways that we, ourselves, were not raised.
This month on the podcast, we're joined by renowned pickle man enthusiast and Elaine May biographer Carrie Courogen to discuss Joan Micklin Silver’s intergenerational NYC rom-com, Crossing Delancey (1988).
Like a Peter Singer thought experiment on meth, Mom and Dad takes the impersonal violence of policy, and the slow violence of eco-catastrophe, and literalizes them within the home.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the franchise’s definitive encapsulation of its own generational impact, and a bridge between generations of moviegoers.
The story of Tales From Earthsea is a chronicle of a misused director and the parade of misunderstandings that torpedoed his debut, nearly taking his career with it.
The viewer emerges from Fellini Satyricon in a queasy stupor, their mind grasping at individual images, even as they push the whole experience away.
It took a movie, not for the first or last time, to hoist my attention to broader ideas. At an evening showing of Nobody’s Fool, it occurred to me that I could become an old man.
Undoubtedly, Julia Ducournau’s films are so titillating because they present body horror as an almost exclusively female enterprise; the violent perpetrators are female, the gaze is female, the classic sense of dread centers around aspects of the female experience.
