Mann’s cinema is that of love and longing on a life-and-death scale—all that matters are the compressed moments we have in which to share it.
What I’ve grown to appreciate is that Superman II is really a movie about the necessity of Superman as an American myth—about the very meaning of Superman.
More often than not, the blockbuster bomb is true of heart, true of passion, and truly, deliriously confounding. These disinherited poor relations aren’t so much Hollywood’s nightmares as they are fever dreams: wild, half-coherent visions barely remembered but always deeply felt.
With Zeus's Law under threat, The Odyssey completes Nolan’s run of films about the end of the world, with each reflecting the way that each generation—perhaps his own most of all—has doomed our future.
Over the two decades of their collaboration, the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger emerged as the working out of a love affair with Britain and Britishness.
Rob Reiner's Stand by Me is about memory. It’s about the ways in which the people who matter do keep standing by us, even after they’ve fallen away.
And so, in the dream-logic of this particular shade, the express train in Brief Encounter is called the express not only because it doesn’t stop, but because, in its not-stopping, it expresses the shy heart of Laura Jesson.
Nostalgia is cheap, and plenty of films peddling it have died on the vine. What sets Back to the Future apart is not that it is nostalgic, but that it grasps nostalgia as a production, a site of labor. It doesn’t remember the past; it re-manufactures it, to spec, on a studio lot.
This, too, is the condition of festival-speak. I pick some films over others because the framework of my experience is not experiential; it is exegetical. I organize myself around opinions I am going to have about things I have not yet seen.
For most of Spielberg’s career, science fiction has been the mechanism through which he learns and teaches empathy. But in Disclosure Day, empathy itself is the speculative leap. The genre function is inverted: science fiction stops speculating about aliens and starts speculating about us. Aliens are ordinary. Human compassion is extraordinary. The sci-fi is us.
Lucrecia Martel’s new documentary feature Nuestra Tierra is a portrait of a particular community on a particular plot of land in a particular municipality, but it opens in the non-descript vacuum of space.
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and The Insider (1999) bookend the history of the United States from Michael Mann’s perspective. Though their circumstances are worlds apart, their stories expose the history of America.