Mann’s cinema is that of love and longing on a life-and-death scale—all that matters are the compressed moments we have in which to share it.
What I’ve grown to appreciate is that Superman II is really a movie about the necessity of Superman as an American myth—about the very meaning of Superman.
More often than not, the blockbuster bomb is true of heart, true of passion, and truly, deliriously confounding. These disinherited poor relations aren’t so much Hollywood’s nightmares as they are fever dreams: wild, half-coherent visions barely remembered but always deeply felt.
With Zeus's Law under threat, The Odyssey completes Nolan’s run of films about the end of the world, with each reflecting the way that each generation—perhaps his own most of all—has doomed our future.
Rob Reiner's Stand by Me is about memory. It’s about the ways in which the people who matter do keep standing by us, even after they’ve fallen away.
Nostalgia is cheap, and plenty of films peddling it have died on the vine. What sets Back to the Future apart is not that it is nostalgic, but that it grasps nostalgia as a production, a site of labor. It doesn’t remember the past; it re-manufactures it, to spec, on a studio lot.
For most of Spielberg’s career, science fiction has been the mechanism through which he learns and teaches empathy. But in Disclosure Day, empathy itself is the speculative leap. The genre function is inverted: science fiction stops speculating about aliens and starts speculating about us. Aliens are ordinary. Human compassion is extraordinary. The sci-fi is us.
To kick off our upcoming Summer Blockbusters issue, we invited longtime BW/DR contributor Frank Falisi to help us work our way through Disclosure Day, the latest summer blockbuster from the director who all but created the genre more than 40 years ago.