Springsteen on Broadway restores and replenishes, briefly buoying our battered hearts and reminding us that we are capable of so much more. Read More
In First Avenger, all Captain America had for a compass was the dream. In Winter Soldier, he had the past. By Civil War, he’d seen both of these totems fall apart in the face of an America certain that it knew better than he did. Read More
Dr. Zhivago makes me think of how my own parents measure time: before the revolution, and after it. Read More
The first half of Ingmar Bergman's script seems to call for an almost comically tight-lipped, stone-faced blankness; the second half calls for at least four different coloratura breakdowns. Ullmann “fought like a lion” in the role, and, just hearing about it, you might imagine her Oscar nomination was a reward for a kind of athletic stamina, a heroic stab at an impossible target. Read More
If The Last Picture Show is a movie about savoring your precious misery, Texasville is a movie about having a bad case of the blues. Read More
For all his admissions that memory is spurious and structured by lack, filmmaker Chris Marker (La Jetée, Sans Soleil) still found something beautiful in “the moss of time.” Read More
Much of what I saw in 2018 reflected a related range of anxieties—about difference, catastrophe, isolation, belonging. Maybe that’s every year. Likely it’s too soon to tell. But among the things I saw, in a year of personal and political upheaval and ambivalence, these are the moments that solicited my attention most memorably. Read More
Mandy is a visionary catalogue of the ways in which we attempt to survive, embrace, or succumb to the pain of living with death, and what happens when we lose the one thing that holds our world together. Read More
Disobedience is a film as fluent in its rendering of the burden of orthodoxy as it is well-versed in the holy liberation of letting go. Read More
In both The Haunting of Hill House and Annihilation, landscapes are the loci of the characters’ malfunctions. Hill House and Area X, respectively, give their characters a place to focus their energy—and then use that energy, that sense of comfort, to undo them. Read More
Jinn’s exploration of Black Muslim girlhood stems from a long tradition of Black women exploring and constructing their own selves. Read More
To watch the show’s four seasons is to watch broad types and tropes become subtler episode by episode, making us slowly question what, and who, the real object of the joke is. Read More