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.
The year Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Véronique premiered at Cannes, I was born one minute before my brother.
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.
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.
In The Color Wheel (2011), Alex Ross Perry very intentionally steers into the tension between his two leads.
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.
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.
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.
