A Simple Favor works so well because it's perfectly cast—or rather, because its cast is perfectly suited to their roles.
Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder is full of faces, and the last one we see belongs to former detective Park Doo-man of the Hwaseong police department in Korea. He's looking at the camera, but really, he's looking at us.
On Knuckle Sandwich, the Paul Thomas Anderson movie that wasn’t.
“Godzilla” is my personal shorthand for a feeling. It’s the fear you feel when you show someone a flawed movie that you nevertheless love, the pressure when you’re watching your best friend’s favorite movie with them for the first time, the rush you get when you find other people who share your fandoms, the conviction that your taste in media reveals an essential part of yourself.
The Apu Trilogy is scarce in plot, but we fall in love with short bursts of characters, feeling their heartbreaks as our own.
I’d love to know what it’s like to be a writer who doesn’t struggle with anxiety and depression, the sort of writer who doesn’t identify with Shirley, curled beneath her sheets in a blacked-out bedroom.
Barry is about the lies we tell to live with ourselves, about characters caught between the truth and the stories that keep them safe.
George Cukor wanted his films to be seen by thousands, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. If anything, this tension—between his genuine artistry and his desire to communicate with the wider American public—makes his films all the more interesting.
Anxiety is Fury Road’s strongest throughline: the beating heart at its center.
The best sports documentaries are those that remind us that these sweeping cultural legends center around protagonists who share our mundane flaws, who disappoint those they care about, who aren’t immunized against suffering and self-sabotage any more than the rest of us normals.
Euphoria is glimpsed through Rue’s wide eyes and is precise in how it captures a mind discombobulated by loss.
Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy is a startling experience in how incomprehension, grief, and love can reshape the world.
