Clocking in at 152 minutes, Funny People is practically a Lav Diaz film in comparison to its American studio comedy brethren. Read More
Though I wouldn’t come out as a trans woman for another four years, Laurence Anyways felt like a map to the puzzle that was my body, a dysphoric labyrinth of ill-fitting limbs and inarticulate desires. Read More
Martin Scorsese's Silence is about entering into the cloud of unknowing, the dark night of the soul, listening to the silence of God and waiting eternally for a response. Read More
Star! was a movie solely predicated on the idea that audiences would turn out in droves simply to see Julie Andrews in another grand-scale musical. It gives her no conflicts. It dramatizes no challenges for her to overcome. And it lasts 2 hours and 53 minutes. Read More
It would seem paradoxical for a film to be both excessive and minimalist, and yet this synthesis is exactly what Wim Wenders achieves with Kings of the Road, taking a storyline so small that it strains the very definition of the term and blowing it out to epic length. Read More
Magnolia is messy, grandiose, ostentatious, overambitious, and overwhelming—or, in the words of its auteur “it’s too fucking long...it’s all just too fucking ‘too.’” It also happens to be my favorite film. Read More
Ever since it's release in 1980, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate has been perceived as a failure. The film’s narrative and characters are obsessed with the idea of failure. The film itself, though, is anything but a failure. Read More
The perfection of Jan de Bont’s Speed owes not to its exemplification of “classical” Hollywood narrative, but to the intensity of its enthusiasm for those norms. Read More
As a narrative, Kieślowski's Red is often recursively and sometimes even reflexively understood. It’s a film of ellipses, of threads dropped and picked up until, suddenly, they are woven. Read More
A trio of 1994 Hollywood mainstream softcore films (Disclosure, Color of Night, and The Last Seduction) are each, in their own way, gripped with masculine fears concerning established sex and gender roles and the women who refuse to conform to them. Read More
Night Shift touches the universal, and the divine, in its own small way, and all without ever losing sight of the urinal over its shoulder. Read More
The studied cool facades Hal Hartley’s characters put on, the way they almost play-act being criminals, the romantic fatalism that drives both the overarching narrative and the characters themselves: These are all elements that would make just as much sense in a Godard or Truffaut joint as they would in a ‘90s American indie film. Read More