In their myriad crime stories, the Coens have tended to take a fatalistic perspective. And then there is the strange case of Raising Arizona's H.I. McDunnough.
Pedro Almodóvar’s Law of Desire repurposes the classic melodrama to tell a series of suppressed narratives with the visual and sentimental poetry they merit.
Innerspace is bodily—hyper-bodily, even—and in the way it upends expectations surrounding size, it suggests similar chutes and ladders for emotion, identity, for existence.
While some would argue that Prince of Darkness fails thematically, narratively, and structurally when compared to other John Carpenter movies, I take pleasure in the film’s unruly appearances.
No book or film is perfect, far from it, but Maurice gets close. It grasps for an ideal, and often, that pursuit is just as worthy.
Whether because of repeat viewings of The Brave Little Toaster, or my own wild imagination, as a kid, I deeply believed (and feared) that my belongings were alive.
This month, we're waxing ecstatic about the humor and humanism at the heart of Elaine May's Ishtar. We match May’s compassion for the brashly stupid Chuck and Lyle (Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, respectively) with special guest Frank Falisi, who lays out his theory that Ishtar is actually a high musical à la Vincente Minnelli.
Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark bites into the myth of American individualism and exceptionalism in Western movies by throwing vampires into the mix.
No one really changes. But, Broadcast News asks, isn’t that kind of beautiful?
This is Withnail and I: Hilarious, tragic, less a cohesive narrative film and more a series of rowdy and ruddy vignettes—like stumbled stops along a pub crawl—designed to make one laugh until crying, and cry until laughing, in equal, sorrowful, comical measure.
