I learned from the Matt Damon characters I knew growing up: Will Hunting, Tom Ripley, and Mike McDermott. I don’t know if, as a young actor from Boston, Damon struggled with his identity—but I know the roles he took helped me find mine.
Championed by the likes of contemporaries Luis Buñuel and Jerry Garcia, and later fully restored with the help of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, The Saragossa Manuscript has a hallowed space in Polish film history.
It’s only through confronting the reality of death that the four girls at the heart of Now and Then are able to move forward from childhood to adulthood.
Ad Astra is a film deeply attuned to a heritage among the stars.
Repo Man is like a piece of bubblegum with a shard of glass in it, the sort of deranged prank that draws blood.
Leave No Trace never lets us forget that we all depend on something outside of ourselves.
On stars, myths, violence, selective nostalgia, and Slow West.
While Lynn Shelton’s Touchy Feely is interested in its characters quirky dynamics and arrested developments, the film is moreso about the destabilizing force of contact.
John Ford's The Searchers wants to do more than construct the American community. It wants to show what it costs to be left outside of that community, and what it costs to be a part of it, too.
If Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover is Brechtian, then The Pillow Book is a painting by Rothko, dependent on its many layers to communicate the meaning of its abstract imagery.
Offering respite from an adult perspective without denying it, Studio Ghibli films often invite viewers into exalted states of innocence.
Almost Famous is both a criticism of and a love letter to an industry where people are pretending to be something they’re not, trying to escape reality and searching for something real, running away from some small version of themselves.
