In 1976's imagined version of 2274, do Black people exist? According to Logan’s Run, you’d think the answer is no.
Can Carrie White simultaneously be the hero and the monster? The clues lie in what has been jettisoned in an otherwise faithful adaptation from page to screen. By removing the conventional protagonist, the adaptation takes on ominous new implications and truly becomes a Brian De Palma film.
It’s not just the idea that the station = a box that’s compelling me to draw these maybe obtuse, maybe overly-academic, maybe seemingly random connections. John Carpenter has built these ideas of superposition and coexisting states into the very thematic structure of Assault on Precinct 13.
Alice, Sweet Alice isn't a theological statement. Not solely. It doesn't posit lazy anti-Catholic bloviations or make the faithful into fools; it uses the imagery, the fables, the metaphors as inspiration for making a smartly, sickly compelling narrative of wickedness and the tragedy of tainted innocence.
Watching All the President’s Men in 2026 provokes a gentle aching because it documents an ecosystem of institutional faith that no longer exists—that truth, once uncovered, possesses the power to shift the world.
To my mind, the 1976 version succeeds better than any other Kong remake, simply because it understands one key idea: King Kong is a story about an ape.
We tell ourselves we’re individuals, beholden to no one, even as we’re shaped by our circumstances. We think of ourselves as the main character. We print the legend. Both Josey Wales and Keoma embody that sense of individualism—and, intentionally or not, their respective movies bear the weight of the contradiction at the heart of being an American.