Issue 90: Frames Archives | Bright Wall/Dark Room

Here, on the beach, Ada and Flora don't appear to be waiting so much as creating something new. Looking at this frame now, as a global pandemic distorts the hours that fill our days, I see a kind of hope and perseverance in how the characters interact with time. Read More

Waiting For An Unnatural Disaster: Still Life

Cheng Mun Chang·

Issue 90: Frames

Watching Still Life with this new perspective, I forced myself to look at every long take, to think about the passing of each period of time within and outside of the film. Read More

The Hunt for Red October (1990) | Paramount Pictures

Some Things in Here Don’t React Well to Bullets

Sarah Welch-Larson·

Issue 90: Frames

In this single shot, The Hunt for Red October presents its stakes: the struggle between an individual and the vast and powerful forces that threaten to swallow him. Read More

Nosferatu the Vampyre | 20th Century Fox

Plague Comes to Town

Andrew Piechota·

Issue 90: Frames

So it is that Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre ends its world—swiftly, and yet by inches. Read More

Even Though It’s Breaking: On Barbarism and Barbers

Frank Falisi·

Issue 90: Frames

To be bold, to dare to be stupid: this single frame in The Great Dictator is the most essential frame occurring in Charles Chaplin’s filmography. It is the most elegant and achy navigation out of comedy, straight through tragedy, and into something like the human struggle ever captured by camera. Read More

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) | Fox Searchlight Pictures

One Nostalgia Later

B.C. Wallin·

Issue 90: Frames

I remember The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I remember those swirling lights and the clutched breath and the deep longing. I think about this frame of Agatha, frozen in time, holding her lover’s gaze—holding our gaze—as the darkness briefly clouds her face. Read More

Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams | Universal Pictures

Between Heaven and Iowa

Ethan Warren·

Issue 90: Frames

In the soft focus of his gaze, Costner shows us a man seeing his own life superimposed onto itself, the uncanny vertiginous struggle to reconcile your existence as someone’s child with your existence as someone’s parent, the effort to locate your own life through triangulation between lives spent and lives just beginning to unfold. Read More

Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally, written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner

The Best Version of Itself: Nora Ephron’s New York in When Harry Met Sally…

Carrie Courogen·

Issue 90: Frames

When I watch Harry and Sally stroll through Central Park, I think to myself, If I could just find a way to crawl inside this movie, inside this version of New York, I could be okay. Read More

A scene from The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky, 1986)

A Drop of Water Reflecting a Divided World

Nikola Grozdanovic·

Issue 90: Frames

The Sacrifice is not as widely celebrated as Tarkovsky's previous masterpieces, but it’s the most germane to our current global disarray. Read More

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) | MGM

With Eyes Like Ripening Fruit

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 90: Frames

You’ve seen the image online or you’ve seen it in your dreams. The gaping mouth, the white of the eyes. The finger pointing straight into the lens. The terrible moment of mirror revelation: I know what you are. Read More

In The Infinite Glow

Fran Hoepfner·

Issue 90: Frames

A throwaway joke in a 105-minute film watched nearly four years ago in a city I’ve only been to twice stands firm like a monolith in the wavy goop of my brain. It is nothing; it is everything. Read More

A painting from Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) | NEON

I Also Felt Your Absence

Lindsey Trout Hughes·

Issue 90: Frames

It's a fleeting moment in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a shot of a small canvas bathed in shadow which horizontal brushstrokes have primed a deep brown. The image of Marianne’s hands at work, Héloïse and Sophie slowly appearing on her canvas, is a rejection of solitude and an embrace of the vulnerability that true sorority requires. Read More