Despite the widow’s omnipresence in society, she remains an object of dangerous fixation.
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.
Breathless is at once a ferociously horny and formally audacious remake of Godard’s hyper-referential film, as well as an all-or-nothing, frenetically American and self-aware meditation on desperately empty people lost in the thrall of the pop culture that gives form to their wants and needs.
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.
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.
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.
Let us thirst again, we beg. It’s one of the few things we have left.
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.
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.
Like amber traps a dragonfly, Saturday Night Fever catches, mid-flight, the moment of ‘70s zeitgeist that accommodated various—and conflicting—definitions of rape.
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.
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.