In our apartments, we can let our guard down, be ourselves. How unnerving then, to realize you were never really safe there—that what you thought was a wall was a door all along. Read More
The Killing of a Sacred Deer provides a deceitfully complex look at a brand of nihilism often adopted by the upper-middle class, used to deflect the threat of domestic banality or subdue emotional threats. Read More
Seeing movies is a gift, and I can’t wait to go back next year. Read More
Though disguised as a neo-noir, in many ways Minority Report is really a sci-fi allegory about how corrupt systems thrive through the subjugation of women, the exploitation and dismissal of their pain, and the underestimation of their emotions and abilities. Read More
Based on John Cheever’s slippery fever dream of a short story, The Swimmer faithfully translates and expands Cheever’s 12 pages of suburban surrealism into a feature-length nightmare of masculine panic. Read More
When your body betrays you, who do you become? Read More
Lots of comedies are funny because they’re goofy, but Step Brothers is funny for the liminality of the world in which it takes place, a world hovering between live-action cartoon and kitchen-sink reality so precariously that it almost seems to violate the laws of comedy physics. Read More
The question of Nocturnal Animals, with its parallel narratives that never quite connect, becomes: what is the urgency of a story in which its greatest violence is called out as fiction? Read More
Crimson Peak hits all the major gothic horror notes: the gauzy nightgowns, the poisoned tea. A little dog trotting curiously down a darkened hallway. Dark legacies. Axe murder.
But all of this is beside the point. Read More
"In my experience, human beings are the same. We laugh like each other, we fall in love like each other, we get sad like each other, we have the same emotions in the same conditions everywhere." Read More
Though the actors’ imperative to “use it” presumes that every feeling’s instrumental function may be clear, graspable, and harmless, there’s a well-documented dark side to improvisational energy, to working without scripts and roles; boundaries that protect as well as corral. Read More
For a film that essentially centers on deception and theft, The Sting is eminently generous. Read More