Jonathan Glazer's 2004 film, Birth, is a meticulously composed film about falling apart. Read More
Practical Magic is finest in the moments it elevates the raucous comedies and petty dramas of siblinghood into the heightened life and death stakes of witches in peril. Read More
In making the strange, familiar (and the familiar, strange), Gattaca forces us to reckon with our own humanity and mortality—and the fact that time is coming for us all. Read More
Stoker is a film about a girl walking the tight ledge between childhood and adulthood, and trying to construct an identity amidst the chaos. Read More
The visuals in Yolanda and the Thief take explicit inspiration from the surrealist landscapes of Salvador Dalí, and while it isn’t the most successful of Vincente Minnelli’s celebrated musicals, it is perhaps the most experimental—and, for me an object of fascination. Read More
A Serious Man isn't just a more personal Coen Brothers film; it is the personal Coen Brothers film, an investigation into their own heritage and what it means to be Jewish in mid-century America. Read More
In our apartments, we can let our guard down, be ourselves. How unnerving then, to realize you were never really safe there—that what you thought was a wall was a door all along. Read More
The Killing of a Sacred Deer provides a deceitfully complex look at a brand of nihilism often adopted by the upper-middle class, used to deflect the threat of domestic banality or subdue emotional threats. Read More
Though disguised as a neo-noir, in many ways Minority Report is really a sci-fi allegory about how corrupt systems thrive through the subjugation of women, the exploitation and dismissal of their pain, and the underestimation of their emotions and abilities. Read More
Based on John Cheever’s slippery fever dream of a short story, The Swimmer faithfully translates and expands Cheever’s 12 pages of suburban surrealism into a feature-length nightmare of masculine panic. Read More
When your body betrays you, who do you become? Read More
Lots of comedies are funny because they’re goofy, but Step Brothers is funny for the liminality of the world in which it takes place, a world hovering between live-action cartoon and kitchen-sink reality so precariously that it almost seems to violate the laws of comedy physics. Read More