As my favorite Fiddler on the Roof song says, “Many times, many men, took our homes, took our lives. Kings they were, gone they are. We’re still here!” We are still here—that’s our gam zu l’tovah.
There are worse ways to ride out the pandemic than mainlining some three dozen or so movies in a week, finding delights where you least expect them.
By keeping us insistently within Bauby's point of view, inside the diving bell, Julian Schnabel reminds us of the range of living and feeling still available to us, if we extend ourselves.
The web of influences upon Over the Garden Wall is vast, but everything coheres around a core of classical Americana, one rooted firmly in the northeast.
Frankenstein rests in the meeting place where the borders between transgression and transcendence touch.
I’m drawn to Clue and In the Mood for Love, two movies that probably couldn’t be more different, because in both, characters use storytelling to investigate their cratered lives.
In my personal canon of films used to scope out how far a new friend is willing to indulge my rotted taste, Adore sits comfortably in the top five.
Grosse Pointe Blank, to me, is the definition of a desert island film: a foundational text, a perennial source of comfort, a go-to reference that lives, in the parlance of today’s youth and the adults who want to be like them, rent-free in one’s brain.
The History of the Seattle Mariners is the first cultural object I’ve encountered that painstakingly constructs a specific, relatable history—that of a single baseball team—only to use that construct to then gesture towards the futility of completion and the locks storytelling puts on our collective subconscious.
I carry Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again with me the way I do band-aids or Excedrin or a spare pen. I know it’s there in case of an emergency.
The Green Knight seeks not simply to retell or reimagine the poem’s story, but to interrogate or cross-examine the poem itself: to cast a shadow of postmodern skepticism over the original telling, and indeed all of Arthuriana.
Almost Famous is not just a story about falling in love with life’s possibilities, nor is it just a story about falling in love with music; at its heart, Almost Famous is a film about falling in love with writing about music. It’s the story of how a boy became a critic.
