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