The Leftovers makes two competing claims: that other people are mostly what gives life meaning; and that, despite guaranteed loss, we have to invest in them anyway.
The Straight Story represents the Lynchian world redeemed, a pocket of America that battled dread and violence and won, earning its just reward.
Hepburn and Grant tumble toward happy endings through chaos and adventure, misunderstandings and trickery, all with an effortless grace.
The real crux of Aubrey and Maturin's friendship, what makes Master And Commander so rich in general, is the way in which the film challenges their relationship and also kind of has an answer for a very a la mode question: how do people with different political beliefs get along?
Marie Antoinette is arguably the centrepiece of Coppola’s MTV-inflected career, conceived as it was as a sort of love letter to the music and music videos she loved as a teenager.
A Prairie Home Companion is a tender meditation on music, memory, and death that holds Robert Altman’s final goodbye inside it like a fly in amber, preserved for all who will listen.
If anything unites Gene Kelly's classic musicals, it’s a belief that no past experience could be horrific enough to prevent you from letting loose that whole-human-race encompassing smile and falling in love with life all over again.
First Reformed and The Good Lord Bird can best be linked by a common, disheartening truth: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
As each male performer in Young Frankenstein revels in his own strangeness, I find new ways to tap dance in my own haunted house.
It’s easy to write off a movie like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so married as it is to the neon tackiness of the early 1990s; it’s much harder to recognize that placing itself squarely into that context is an extraordinary device.
For a long time, if justice had a name, it had to be Lt. Columbo.
Three seemingly dissimilar works are united by three seemingly diffuse concepts that all lead back to the same place: the unique capacity of film to evoke some of the mind’s most indescribable sensations.