Mandy is a visionary catalogue of the ways in which we attempt to survive, embrace, or succumb to the pain of living with death, and what happens when we lose the one thing that holds our world together.
As much as The Miseducation of Cameron Post is about finding salvation within one’s self, it is also about finding hope and protection in the arms of a chosen family.
Much of what I saw in 2018 reflected a related range of anxieties—about difference, catastrophe, isolation, belonging. Maybe that’s every year. Likely it’s too soon to tell. But among the things I saw, in a year of personal and political upheaval and ambivalence, these are the moments that solicited my attention most memorably.
The cinematic alchemy of Burning transforms an abstract theory of liminality into something that an audience can feel in the pulse of every scene and then, perhaps, in their own world.
A mid-winter love affair feels decadent but also rather necessary, and Cold War rewards like a hot chocolate spiked with brandy: warming, bracing, to be savored.
Jinn’s exploration of Black Muslim girlhood stems from a long tradition of Black women exploring and constructing their own selves.
In both The Haunting of Hill House and Annihilation, landscapes are the loci of the characters’ malfunctions. Hill House and Area X, respectively, give their characters a place to focus their energy—and then use that energy, that sense of comfort, to undo them.
This is where humiliation lives: in the gap between the self we want to be and the self we actually are.
To watch the show’s four seasons is to watch broad types and tropes become subtler episode by episode, making us slowly question what, and who, the real object of the joke is.
This scream is a scream of defiance.
It's hard to know whether The Mule will be Clint Eastwood’s final film, either in front of or behind the camera—but it sure feels like it.
What makes Mission: Impossible - Fallout and Free Solo what they are is not death. It’s the spectatorship of death., watching those around a person come to terms with what we all know is out there.