If this is a list, let it be a syllabus, a series of entry points joined by common questions: What does it look and sound like to understand your life, previously envisioned as exclusively “ahead,” as incrementally, but increasingly, behind? What can a moment of emotional accuracy accomplish? What imperative pleasures does meticulousness afford? Read More
Mike Mills' Beginners and 20th Century Women are both deeply personal and generous films, acknowledging how impossible it is to ever truly know one’s parent or child. Read More
In late 2014, I walked into a movie theater at 9 in the morning to watch Force Majeure at a film festival in Belgium, running on a combination of jetleg and a strong Americano. The movie’s subtitles were in French only, and mon français est bon mais pas super. Still, I sat enrapt, dumbfounded and aghast. Read More
Sleeping with Other People marries the sexual frankness of 21st-century rom-coms to the wry, literate wit of classic Nora Ephron—and the human honesty of great movies in all eras. Read More
Rick Alverson's 2012 film The Comedy is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a piece of filmmaking that critiques the very game it plays. Read More
As I watched Twin Peaks: The Return each week, I couldn’t help but recall the words of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” Read More
The fundamental ethos of Catholicism in its purest form is the animating idea of The Immigrant. Its philosophical approach transcends the specific particulars of the Church, instead acquiring an operatic, metaphorical scale. Read More
David Robert Mitchell's It Follows makes paranoid subjects of us all. Read More
How a Comedy Central docuseries hosted by an unassuming weirdo rode a tidal wave of scams straight into the pantheon of the decade’s strangest and most significant art. Read More
Sean Baker's The Florida Project is among the most memorable and powerful Disney—or, at least, Disney-adjacent—films of the 21st century. Read More
The Bright Wall/Dark Room editors share their favorite films from the past ten years. Read More