The Banshees of Inisherin had broken my heart, but made me laugh so much that I’d missed my own heartbreak occurring; I’d enjoyed the movie too much to spot the knives gleaming beneath its surface.
It’s not Benny’s fraught relationship with Kathy that generates the central heartache in The Bikeriders—it’s the way Johnny looks at Benny and wants so badly to see a kind of son, a reflection of himself, a person who could love him for who he always wanted to be.
Some of country music’s best songs suggest that the singers are laughing through the pain, using humor as a salve for emotional wounds. That interplay between laughter and heartbreak, a weary chuckle preceding a bitter sob, is the connective tissue that binds Robert Altman's Nashville and Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed.
Kira Muratova’s The Tuner cuts between seemingly unrelated moments, abandoning comfortable transitions while remaining committed to a chronological progression of distorted time.
At its heart, The Truffle Hunters is a profound, poetic reflection on man’s friendship with animals, the evils of corruption and capitalism (which they would argue are inseparable), and our tenuous place on a warming planet.
In The Night House (2020), Beth (Rebecca Hall) has spent fourteen years believing her life told a certain kind of love story. And then, just as quickly, we discover this narrative has changed.
What does it mean to love someone who pursues you as an object? Is it only ever a delusion to imagine that such love can be reciprocal? If Shopgirl works at all as a story about doomed love, fated but not feted, it depends on the answer to those questions.