My partner died unexpectedly in June, and now, whenever I go to the movie theater, I carry his driver’s license so that he can watch, too. In life, we were connected through our love of film. In his death, I’m not ready to give that up.
Are you humming the four bars of choonka-CHOONKAs that form the first measures of “Get Back” right now? It’s always in the air. It’s always waiting to be remembered.
Ridley Scott's House of Gucci sits in a frustrating liminal space, always both too much and not enough, preposterous in its way, but not as preposterous as it should be.
This month on the show, we’re diving deep into Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog with film critic and Quorum (Film Quarterly) editor Girish Shambu.
The more I see Riders of Justice, the more I understand how this oddball philosophical comedy served as a perfect balm for my weird, terrible year.
Drive My Car suggests that art itself is a vehicle for both communication and self-exploration. It can communicate what cannot be said out loud, if we are willing to listen, and can also be the vessel through which we better understand who we are.
Whatever Bo Burnham’s Inside is—a stand-up routine, a television special, a piece of musical theater, a music album, a documentary, a cinematic selfie, a confession—I think it’s cinema.
Licorice Pizza offered me more of the joys of cinema than anything has in years, but I regret its perpetuation of an erasure ironically similar to that practiced in the era Anderson satirizes.
The magic trick of Joanna Hogg’s film is not so much that The Souvenir Part II is funnier or stranger or better than its predecessor: it’s that Part II redefines both films as another form of memoir entirely.
Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is a a true musical, with brass-cracking orchestration; colors so anodyne they whisper, so blaring they shout; voices that soar and temporize and stay. Within seconds, it necessitates its own existence.
The very best films and first watches in 2021 from the BW/DR editorial team.
The great literary twist of Midnight Mass is that, after all that, their salvation is also their sin, and it is entirely earthly, entirely finite.