posts Archives - Bright Wall/Dark Room

Memento is not an exact mirror of Leonard’s lived experience, but its structure forces the viewer to confront the ephemerality of memory on a loop, just as he does. The constant losing battle of trying to hold on to distinct moments, even as they slip beyond our reach.

Episode #32: The Craft (with Katie Walsh)

Bright Wall/Dark Room·

Issue 123: Nostalgia Podcast

It’s nearly spooky season and we’re waxing nostalgic for The Craft (1996) with Los Angeles film critic and podcaster extraordinaire Katie Walsh. We get into crushing on Robin Tunney, the 90s, the death of subculture, slow-motion hallway walks, where are their parents—and stay tuned for Katie’s on-air pull from the Rachel True tarot deck.

A Marvelous Grace

Julia Sirmons·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

Legendary directors Max Ophüls and Luchino Visconti are all over its sets and settings, but in its bones Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel pays tribute to the effortless glamour, ineffable humor, and pleasurable melancholy of Ernst Lubitsch.

The Folks Who Live(d) on the Hill: Of Time and the City

Lizzie Mackarel·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

Terence Davies's Of Time and the City is about the most desperate and profound longing, that impossible desire to return to something intangible—to have known then what we know now, and in the process save something of ourselves.

Cruising Towards Memory: On Boulevard Nights

Tom Cendejas·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

Screenshot from the trailer for Boulevard Nights

Now edging past middle-age, Chicano, raised in southeast L.A., a professional educator, I’ve been engaged in an affair with movies that has lasted a lifetime—and realized I’m always riding shotgun myself when it comes to truly sharing a common film past.

Facing Amy

Betsy Housten·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

An illustration of the titular Amy (Joey Lauren Adams) from CHASING AMY in front of a blue comic-illustration-style background.

The first few times I saw Chasing Amy, I loved it. Central to my adoration was the inimitable Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams)—her confidence and swagger as she sat on a playground swing set and impishly demonstrated the act of fisting with her hands, interrogated heterosexual men about their limited perceptions of sexuality and desire, and played gratuitous tonsil hockey with another woman on the crowded dance floor of legendary NYC dyke bar Meow Mix (RIP).

An Audrey Girl

Carrie Courogen·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

The older I get, the more I find myself impressed by Audrey Hepburn as an actor who was great in spite of her packaging; by the evolution of her raw and untrained talent over the span of her relatively short career; and most of all, by the undeniably prickly undercurrent of her most iconic films.

The Alternative Press

Ethan Warren·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

The now of Joan Micklin Silver’s 1977 masterpiece Between the Lines is a major concern for the characters. What is this generation’s identity now, another decade into adulthood and another decade removed from the days in which they believed they might actually change the world?

I Used to Float, Now I Just Fall Down

Lindsey Romain·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

Margot Robbie in BARBIE | art by Brianna Ashby

Barbie is not entirely a musical. It’s more a patchwork quilt of influence: the scuttlebutt dialogue of Hawks, the quiet sensuality of Almodóvar, the transient yearning of Wenders. But it’s the musicality that brings it to life—that pours soul into Barbie’s plastic limbs.

Episode #31: 3 Women (1977)

Bright Wall/Dark Room·

Extras Podcast

This month we bid goodbye to summer with Robert Altman’s hallucinatory 3 Women (1977), a Palm Springs take on Persona.

The Startling Humanity of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion

Catherine Ellsberg·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

Brazen and radical, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion offers not only a beautiful story of friendship, but also forces each of us to journey back to those hallowed grounds of high school, and to reexamine the years since.

News From Home: Ode To The Death And Life Of One Great American City

Dylan Fugel·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

News from Home reminds us that film, as an art form, is only capable of reconstructing, re-making paths that have already been trod, of showing scars but not soothing the wound, of hearing from home but being unable to change the fact that it took you a long time to come back.