In John Carpenter’s 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s haunted-car novel Christine, the road to hell is paved not with good intentions, but with time.
This month on the show, we’re doing a little time traveling of our own. On the heels of the growing buzz for Rian Johnson’s new genre love letter Glass Onion, we’re discussing his 2012 sci-fi thriller, Looper.
On death-sentence testimonies in Blade Runner, Wings of Desire, and Nomadland.
The story of Sandi Tan's Shirkers is one of a search for lost time.
Could Grease actually be a whole lot smarter than we give it credit for? Long story short: yes. Allow me to make the case for the 1978 movie not as a dodgy product of its time, but as a countercultural artifact we could still learn a thing or two from.
Taken as a body of work, the Before trilogy asks us to consider the tension between its fantasy and naturalism, and the extent of our own ability to exert similar control over a lonely world that ushers us through life without concern for whether we’ve found any meaning in it.
In its fragments, its gradations and flirtations with the experimental ambience it’s quote-unquote about, Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground renders not a history of a band or even a moment but an alternative lens to re-collect (literally, re-touch) history.
Technically, Olivier Assayas' new Irma Vep is a remake about a remake of a film about a remake of Louis Feuillade’s epic 1915-16 silent serial, Les Vampires. Heartbreakingly, it’s about the consequences of trying to transcend reality by using filmmaking as a vehicle to touch the light.
Removed from the impossible tangle of time travel, Donnie Darko is really just a mood.
Chris Marker's La Jetée is less tragic than instructive, exploring our incapacity to alter the past in order to urge us to come to terms with what has been.
