featured Archives - Bright Wall/Dark Room

Where Asteroid City shines, where it is made masterpiece, is in its brief flashes of joy: a good picture, a milkshake, a song and dance, one more martini. Here is a life not perfect—soldiers wielding guns, no personal space, endless boredom—made enviable by one thing only: each other.

Hungry Boys and Girls: On Phantom Thread’s Strange Kinship

Joe Steen·

Issue 118: Siblings

Part fairy tale, part ghost story, Phantom Thread starkly pushes the genre of Gothic Romance into the positively morbid. Yet the fundamental ambiguity in its human relationships casts the longest shadow in this story, filling every corner of the stately rooms in which two unabashedly English souls organize their lives to deny their own fragility.

…But What Am I?

Mark Dzula·

Issue 117: On The Road

Whether lost in the pregnant pause of a phantom victory, swamped by the rush of bizarre sex appeal, or struggling with the desire to follow a new best friend but kept back by the ironclad claims of home, Pee-wee understands that dreams are the basis for strange journeys.

The Fastest Racer Always Wins

Liz Robau·

Issue 116: Sports

Robert Redford and Gene Hackman in Downhill Racer (1969) | Art by Gary Mills

Less parable, more portrait of an athlete as a young man, Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer reminds us that our yearning for a moral arc of sport is just that: a yearning.

Maybe So, Sir, but Not Today: The Fragile Humanity of Top Gun: Maverick

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 115: Best of 2022

Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick | Art by Tom Ralston

Top Gun: Maverick is not, at its heart, a story about what one man can achieve. Instead, it's an exploration of whether Man even matters.

The Christiean Architecture of Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion

Justin Hairston·

Issue 115: Best of 2022

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, takes the classic structures of a Christie caper and levels them up, building an impossibly polyhedral monument to all that a mystery can be.

A Few Ways of Looking at The Fabelmans

Frank Falisi·

Issue 115: Best of 2022

The Fabelmans is not a coming-of-age story. There is no answer. It isn’t a parable or lesson or meditation. Instead it reflects, renders in real time, its creator’s relationship to his memories.

Three Square Meals a Day

Fran Hoepfner·

Issue 114: Romantic Comedies

In weaker, lesser, dumber hands, Design for Living is a movie about three horny morons; in Lubitsch’s, all three characters spark and sparkle, an abundance of wit powering them through reckless indecisions.

Meet-Cute at the Morgue

Calvin McMillin·

Issue 114: Romantic Comedies

Park Chan-wook’s new film may come to us in the guise of a detective story, a police procedural, even a quasi-erotic thriller. But at its heart, Decision to Leave is really a romantic comedy.

I’ve Seen Things You Wouldn’t Believe

Jeffrey Overstreet·

Issue 111: Time Travel

On death-sentence testimonies in Blade Runner, Wings of Desire, and Nomadland.

Memories of the Future

Nathaniel Kim·

Issue 111: Time Travel

Taken as a body of work, the Before trilogy asks us to consider the tension between its fantasy and naturalism, and the extent of our own ability to exert similar control over a lonely world that ushers us through life without concern for whether we’ve found any meaning in it.

Nothing Like Wrestling With a Moral Dilemma, Is There?

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 110: 1987

No one really changes. But, Broadcast News asks, isn’t that kind of beautiful?