One of Naoko Yamada’s most striking and unique traits as a director is her ability to convey the emotional intensity of a love confession, not through bombast or theatrical showiness, but through the startling vulnerability of a genuinely honest conversation. Read More
What we commend as “real” in life as in film, and perhaps in Scorsese’s films in particular, we might call gritty, dark, or uncompromising; The Age of Innocence proposes otherwise. What could be more violent than a life sculpted by compromise? Read More
On the uneasy duality of Identity in Mira Nair's The Namesake. Read More
Michael Haneke’s films emphatically resist interpretation, laying out strange and sometimes bewildering scenarios that remain unresolved even as the end credits roll. Read More
Like many American landscapes, Connecticut’s pop culture identity is so omnipresent that it’s sometimes difficult to tell where the stereotypes end and the real place begins. Read More
Rather than convincing us that we’re better off keeping our secrets, Le Jeu demonstrates what happens when our secrets remain stagnant—instead of providing relief, they suffocate us. Read More
Hot Rod is an activist text. It is not escapist; its weirdness calls attention to the flaws of our world instead of distracting from them. Read More
Mike Nichols' Working Girl, at its heart, is a film that examines the nuances of the intersection of class and feminism, packaged slyly in the form of a light-hearted, girl power-flavored workplace comedy. Read More
Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said, a quiet, charming romantic comedy, is also the most stressful movie ever committed to film. Read More
For a story as doom-laden as Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight, the mere desire to do good—and do it the right way—must be hope enough. Read More