In John Carpenter’s 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s haunted-car novel Christine, the road to hell is paved not with good intentions, but with time.
This month on the show, we’re doing a little time traveling of our own. On the heels of the growing buzz for Rian Johnson’s new genre love letter Glass Onion, we’re discussing his 2012 sci-fi thriller, Looper.
On death-sentence testimonies in Blade Runner, Wings of Desire, and Nomadland.
The story of Sandi Tan's Shirkers is one of a search for lost time.
Could Grease actually be a whole lot smarter than we give it credit for? Long story short: yes. Allow me to make the case for the 1978 movie not as a dodgy product of its time, but as a countercultural artifact we could still learn a thing or two from.
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.
In its fragments, its gradations and flirtations with the experimental ambience it’s quote-unquote about, Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground renders not a history of a band or even a moment but an alternative lens to re-collect (literally, re-touch) history.
Technically, Olivier Assayas' new Irma Vep is a remake about a remake of a film about a remake of Louis Feuillade’s epic 1915-16 silent serial, Les Vampires. Heartbreakingly, it’s about the consequences of trying to transcend reality by using filmmaking as a vehicle to touch the light.
Removed from the impossible tangle of time travel, Donnie Darko is really just a mood.
Chris Marker's La Jetée is less tragic than instructive, exploring our incapacity to alter the past in order to urge us to come to terms with what has been.
This is Withnail and I: Hilarious, tragic, less a cohesive narrative film and more a series of rowdy and ruddy vignettes—like stumbled stops along a pub crawl—designed to make one laugh until crying, and cry until laughing, in equal, sorrowful, comical measure.
This month, we're waxing ecstatic about the humor and humanism at the heart of Elaine May's Ishtar. We match May’s compassion for the brashly stupid Chuck and Lyle (Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, respectively) with special guest Frank Falisi, who lays out his theory that Ishtar is actually a high musical à la Vincente Minnelli.
