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Issue 118: Siblings

April 2023

Phantom Thread | art by Brianna Ashby

Hungry Boys and Girls: On Phantom Thread’s Strange Kinship

Joe Steen·
Issue 118: Siblings
Part fairy tale, part ghost story, Phantom Thread starkly pushes the genre of Gothic Romance into the positively morbid. Yet the fundamental ambiguity in its human relationships casts the longest shadow in this story, filling every corner of the stately rooms in which two unabashedly English souls organize their lives to deny their own fragility.
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Episode #23: Wings of Desire (with Karina Wolf)

Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman·
Issue 118: SiblingsPodcast
On this month's show, Karina Wolf joins us to discuss Wings of Desire, the essential decency of Bruno Ganz, Peter Falk’s warmth, transformative romance, whether angels have grandmas, Henri Alekan’s dignifying vision, Wim Wenders’s lack of strategy, how particulars turn universal, and more.
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Doubled Life

S. Brook Corfman·
Issue 118: Siblings
The year Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Véronique premiered at Cannes, I was born one minute before my brother.
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When Mermaids Come of Age: Sisterhood in The Lure and The Little Mermaid

Celia Mattison·
Issue 118: Siblings
I wonder if other mermaid girls have survived the transition to shore, or if most of them return to the safety and innocence of the sea.
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“Friends, Lovers, or Neighbors”

Frank Falisi·
Issue 118: Siblings
In Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the act of witnessing becomes an act of solidarity, in joy and of pain. This is what a cinema of more life looks like.
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In The Color Wheel, Opposite Shades are Complementary

Ben Rosenstock·
Issue 118: Siblings
In The Color Wheel (2011), Alex Ross Perry very intentionally steers into the tension between his two leads.
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Sometimes the Spaghetti Likes to be Alone

Olivia Rutigliano·
Issue 118: Siblings
This is the nature of Big Night: not to find a way to serve the risotto and the spaghetti together, but to strip the brothers down to their common element.
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Fleabag | artwork by Brianna Ashby

This Is a Love Letter: Fleabag, A Streetcar Named Desire, and My Sister

Veronica Phillips·
Issue 118: Siblings
If Fleabag can be seen as a love story about sisterhood—that magical, ephemeral, deeply intimate, sometimes painful, and impossible to describe relationship—then may this essay be a love letter to my own sister. 
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© Bright Wall/Dark Room, LLC 2013-2026
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