From early morning meditation before the sun breaks over the horizon to laborious community service, Christopher Makoto Yogi’s August at Akiko's examines the ways in which Alex returns home.
Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday is a soft-spoken reminder that, in order to discover greater elements about ourselves, we often need the time and space to do so.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, more than any other movie, typifies the marvelous misleading pleasures of the teen manifest destiny romance.
This is a film in which scenes abut each other, a pulp detective picture that’s stochastically pensive. Yet Sam approaches the climax as if he has time to spare; day ellipses into night as he continues to wander.
In The Lizzie McGuire Movie, adults are irresponsible, Italians are fake, rules don’t exist, vacation is life-changing, and everything turns out great.
In a Tati production, Hulot is less a character and more so the center of a film-length Busby Berkeley-esque set piece, a minimalist dance number populated not with twirling seas of legs, but with steps exchanged in perfect balance between Hulot, the ensemble cast, and a sly, meddlingly playful environment.
The title Unrelated places emphasis upon the fact that Anna is a friend, bonded by neither blood nor marriage to the people with whom she inhabits this bit of time and space. There’s an intense sense of volatility in this status—the sense that one wrong move could lead to irreparable damage: ostracization. Her loose ties to these people do not include an assurance of unconditional love.
While futility’s determinism implies an endlessness, or a sense of the too-late, fate’s determinism implies a finality—like vacation, a destination. Le Rayon vert illustrates and evokes the messy relationship between the two; the ways futility and fate are both synonymous and opposite.
Even in 1939, when The Wizard of Oz first pictured Kansas in sepia, it might’ve been the color of nostalgia—the color of old photographs, a certain shade of dirt.
Alfonso Cuarón's most lauded project, Roma, is a rare example of a film that conveys the beauty and danger of the ocean in equal measure, as one and the same.
Where the Boys Are, regarded as one of the earliest “beach movies,” may seem to be about a girls’ trip undertaken by four friends, but the truth is right there in the title: this film is about men. The women are simply caught in their gravitational pull.
In No Bears (2022), Jafar Panahi examines the boundaries that delineate his existence as an artist and as a citizen, flirting with the idea of escape, then drawing back, reluctant to leave the country he loves and doesn’t fully understand, a place at once both home and hostile.