Sean Baker's The Florida Project is among the most memorable and powerful Disney—or, at least, Disney-adjacent—films of the 21st century. Read More
Actress and director Lee Grant reflects on her 70 year career in Hollywood. Read More
The Postmodern Mysteries of Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing Read More
Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels is a tragi-comic noir about criminals who break their own hearts trying to find themselves and connect to others. Read More
I was wrong about so many things in 2014. I was wrong about Gone Girl. And, most significantly, I was wrong about my gender. Read More
How do we define a new masculinity that encourages men to engage emotionally with the world and with themselves? How do we teach men to ask for help, and how will society offer it? Read More
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence features mismatched animation styles, non sequitur montages, a sphinxlike plot presentation, and bulky meditations on the nature of reality. But such committed excessiveness, for this viewer, makes Innocence my favorite kind of film: powerful in its earnestness, and captivating in its thoughtful defiance. Read More
Fargo is an outlier in the world of neo-noir, protecting its heroes by ending their stories and defiantly leaving their purity intact as though to prove that happy endings are possible. Read More
It’s hard to absorb Black Widow if one is unprepared to see women as people. But once the audience understands that the relationship between these women powers the film—not their relationships with the men around them—its true quality becomes evident. Read More
In neo-noir roles, Mickey Rourke’s faces change, but his power as an actor never does. Read More
Critics and fans have accurately described Hustlers as a bedazzled Recession-era period piece. But the movie is equally specific to our times, the first in Hollywood history to produce movie after movie about ordinary(ish) women doing crimes. Read More
It would be natural to assume it’s impossible to recreate Harold Pinter’s effects on-screen. What cinematic setting could ever replicate the feeling of an ordinary space that simultaneously exists in a howling metaphysical void? Read More