Don’t Look Now is a story about vision. The things we see, the things we don’t, the things we see without using our eyes.
This month on the show, we're joined by poet, educator, and original BW/DR co-conspirator Elizabeth Cantwell to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s (now) beloved psychosexual Christmas thriller, Eyes Wide Shut.
Nationality is the theme that bookends The English Patient, looping one timeline back into the other and overriding Almásy and Katharine’s affair as the ultimate question of the narrative.
Orson Welles' Othello is a fever dream in both production and result—the former a nightmare, the latter bliss.
Like most of the serial killer thrillers it’s said to vanguard, Manhunter smacks of gender. Our hardened hero is not just softened by his traumatic past, but broken by it, his manhood warped by the terror that now governs him.
Was it always supposed to get this bad? Can it possibly get any worse? These questions are never spoken in Sidney Lumet’s masterfully taut Fail Safe, but endlessly they bounce around the margins.
My unpopular opinion is that Wild Mountain Thyme is a transcendent work of art. Not from any objective standpoint, but rather from that of one particular head and heart: my own.
On the unbearable, beautiful messiness of a single line from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
Part-essay, part-collage, part-apocalyptic tone poem, Bitter Lake captures better than any other film, both factually and aesthetically, the chaotic quagmire of the Afghanistan war, while situating it within a historical context that gives some clarity to the madness.
Other, more recent superhero films may claim to be grim—and certainly achieve a gritty, surface-level style—but in Batman Returns, we have something that seems to deliver an underbelly of actual darkness: upsettingly discolored bodily fluids, thrillingly unhealthy psychosexual games, raw fish, toxic sewage, and a semi-catatonic ‘hero’ who barely speaks.