It’s brilliant, on a meta level, to let Molly's Game falter for the same reasons Molly does. Read More
The Band’s Visit lets us know, right from the start, that what happens here may be small and quiet, but it matters. It may not seem like it on the surface. It won't change the world. It may not even change the lives of the characters within it. But, even so, it matters. Read More
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a love letter to its city. Read More
I felt drawn to Stand by Me in a way I had never been drawn to a movie before, longing each day to reimmerse myself in this soft-focused sun-dappled boy’s idyll. But still I wonder: what parts of me did this movie speak to? Read More
On Judy Berlin (1999) and Madeline Kahn's best, most nuanced, and final performance. Read More
Lynn Shelton’s camera in Humpday is a scalpel, opening the flesh of male-on-male anxiety with precision and nuance. Read More
It is the first day of summer 1962 in Paris, and it is a beautiful day, and for Cléo, everything is falling apart. Read More
One of Naoko Yamada’s most striking and unique traits as a director is her ability to convey the emotional intensity of a love confession, not through bombast or theatrical showiness, but through the startling vulnerability of a genuinely honest conversation. Read More
What we commend as “real” in life as in film, and perhaps in Scorsese’s films in particular, we might call gritty, dark, or uncompromising; The Age of Innocence proposes otherwise. What could be more violent than a life sculpted by compromise? Read More
On the uneasy duality of Identity in Mira Nair's The Namesake. Read More
My first absence was my father’s. For most of my childhood, I didn’t know him, though I grew up with his image. Read More
Michael Haneke’s films emphatically resist interpretation, laying out strange and sometimes bewildering scenarios that remain unresolved even as the end credits roll. Read More