For our annual fashionably late “Best Of” issue, we’re looking at a 2022 highlight: Charlotte Wells’s staggering debut feature Aftersun, with film critic, author, and educator Adam Nayman.
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.
Writing about Memoria ignites the very challenge Jessica faces: how do I translate my thoughts to another person who cannot hold them, and why am I so determined to do so?
Terence Davies' Benediction is not a puzzle, nor does it court confusion. Instead, it explains how Siegfried Sassoon’s life, whether he wants it or not, is a blessing.
We know the songs and the big story beats, but Baz Luhrmann shows us that with Elvis, there's still more to discover; not facts, really, but feelings.
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.
Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All is a film that is full of flesh, but also anti-flesh: ethereality and ephemerality.
Mad God is a stop-motion nightmare, a film that reads like a Boschian painting, a voyeur’s dream, and a dire warning all at once.
James Gray's Armageddon Time traces a line from 1980 to now and asks, with no shortage of despair: What exactly has changed?
"To see a character like Lydia Tár onscreen feels both cathartic and thorny."
The Great Muppet Caper is ultimately a metatextual love poem to the magic of moviemaking and its raw, beating heart rests in a tenuous love triangle between Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Charles Grodin.
On the rom-com genre's obsession with numbers, love as algebra, and What's Your Number (2011)