By transposing Raymond Carver’s stories to Los Angeles, Robert Altman's Short Cuts fashions a narrative that is less about the Los Angeles of our collective imagination and more about the real LA most of us don’t care to know.
In William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A., a quintessential Los Angeles crime thriller, artifice reigns, but so too does art.
When trying to sell someone on the merits of Under the Silver Lake, I tend to fall back on the same phrase: “It’s a movie that’s having a nervous breakdown.”
While Beginners and In a Lonely Place are radically different films, both portray their characters’ attempts to close the distance between themselves and others, drifting through chiasmatic stories from fear to delusion to fear again.
Hardcore, Paul Schrader’s sophomoric knockout, marked the end of an era—a final chapter in 1970s auteur cinema and the beginning of the slick, commercialized films that defined much of the 1980s.
The exclusivity of that Los Angeles phenomenon—and the loneliness inherent within it—is the focus of writer-director Sofia Coppola’s only male-centered film, Somewhere.
In John Carpenter's three primary Los Angeles films—Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, and Escape from L.A.—he explores the degree to which paranoia is essential to the American way of life.
