Around the margins of their sales work, the mag crew in American Honey lives a hedonistic existence, chasing impulses and urges, expressing themselves physically when their verbal powers fail them.
Despite the widow’s omnipresence in society, she remains an object of dangerous fixation.
I want to be Big Dick Richie, drenching myself in water to the beat of my favorite song. I want to be that alive to the present moment, that connected to my own heart.
Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is To the Wonder’s shadow, its doppelganger, its evil twin, and perhaps its better half. It’s Malick through the looking glass.
Like amber traps a dragonfly, Saturday Night Fever catches, mid-flight, the moment of ‘70s zeitgeist that accommodated various—and conflicting—definitions of rape.
The further we get from American Psycho’s release, the closer we get to the world it depicted. The satire becomes more pointed, but instead of being a fun indictment of the ‘80s, it becomes an unsettling reflection of the way we live now.
Interview with the Vampire contains far more complex themes about human desires than initially meets the eye, and at the center of it all is Tom Cruise’s Lestat—the embodiment of a literal thirst trap, and a proud entry in the larger cinematic tradition of vampiric eroticism.
On the surface, Last Action Hero seems to be an action-buddy comedy with a gimmick—enjoyable for its humor, action set pieces, and clever metafictional gags—but at bottom it is a trenchant critique of action movies, the model of exaggerated masculinity they promote, and the real-life violence they both reflect and project.
Let us thirst again, we beg. It’s one of the few things we have left.
In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a carnal energy roils and simmers in the air, like the thunderstorms rolling in over the plantation, drenching everyone to the bone.
By reframing fandom as tried and true romance, showing characters committing under the best and worst circumstances, Bull Durham raises different stakes than both traditional sports movies and traditional romantic comedies.
We can’t all agree to keep the planet inhabitable, yet somehow we all agree about Dwayne Johnson. He’s a universal, human, humanist thirst trap—irresistible because he trades in things we can all agree on.