How might we watch each other well? Jeff and Lisa construct genuine mutual understanding by the film’s end. Their transformation is obvious, quite simply, in the way they look at each other: in what the camera shows us on their faces, in the miniscule recognition scenes Hitchcock offers his viewers. As they solve the murder together, they come to a fuller understanding of each other and the way the constraints of gender figure in their relationship.
In another life, I find myself thinking as I watch K-ON! for the first time, I would have had friends like those to support my beginnings on guitar. I recognize, almost immediately, the unspoken sentiment in that wish—that what I really wanted was friends like the girls I saw onscreen.
Merry Cruisemas, from our home to yours! For our third annual celebration, Veronica and Chad sit down with bosom buddy, film critic, and podcast extraordinaire Blake Howard to discuss Doug Liman’s 2014 film, Edge of Tomorrow.
It’s A Wonderful Life is rich in the purest sense of the word because it is so many things—a romantic drama, a capitalist critique, an existential crisis, a chronicle of 20th century American history—but more than anything else, it’s one of the all-time great Dad movies. It’s a movie about the absence of your father.
Despite traces of his legacy in notable contemporary filmmakers, Mitchell Leisen’s legacy is still small in comparison to his ability. If his collaborative working methods and aesthetically oriented, implicitly queer style have marginalized his body of work, then there is value in reclaiming the best of them as important, unique films in cinematic history.
Even when Mr. Hunham and Angus start to see each other as more than just teacher and student, and though a significant portion of The Holdovers takes place away from Barton Academy, the total institution still casts a shadow over their relationship.
When we die, our stories disappear. Both become inevitable. For The Innocents, this muddy area of storytelling is unreliable, an attempt for Miss Giddens to show God she has done right by the children. But for Bly Manor, one carries on a story, regardless of its truth, to keep the dead alive.
Rashomon and The Tale supply the ink that will eventually write my story. They speak to me, yes; but more accurately, they speak to each other through me.
The character of Heather Donahue may not have found her way out of the woods in The Blair Witch Project, but the woman who played her did.
Jun Ichikawa's adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story, Tony Takitani, grapples not only with the inexplicable compulsion to collect things, but also with a difficult situation that most all of us will have to face, collector or not: what do we do when the people we love, the ones who once imbued these material objects with meaning, are no longer with us?
Over its two seasons, Patriot traces that meteoric descent with a humanist’s touch, turning international espionage into quotidian drama and grounding the global politics of nuclear armament in the mundane specifics of industrial piping workplaces and father-son dynamics.











