Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story has nothing but empathy, the kind I’ve been craving, for Charlie and Nicole Barber—even when it would be easy not to, and especially when they have so little for each other. Read More
Honey Boy and Doctor Sleep bleed from the same heart, an intimate diptych about abused boys who grow into men haunted by and reaching for their fathers. Read More
Instead of taking issue with the facts of what Frank Sheeran tells us, The Irishman unravels the way he positions himself within his account. Read More
Whenever I put on I Think You Should Leave, its bedlam feels like a weighted blanket—a brief and soothing respite from the horrible truths of the outside world. Read More
The way we experience movies shapes the way we experience life, and to experience a movie like The Beach Bum, to ingest and absorb this much giddy existential gratitude, strikes at least this viewer as quite a blessing. Read More
If this is a list, let it be a syllabus, a series of entry points joined by common questions: What does it look and sound like to understand your life, previously envisioned as exclusively “ahead,” as incrementally, but increasingly, behind? What can a moment of emotional accuracy accomplish? What imperative pleasures does meticulousness afford? Read More
Mike Mills' Beginners and 20th Century Women are both deeply personal and generous films, acknowledging how impossible it is to ever truly know one’s parent or child. Read More
In late 2014, I walked into a movie theater at 9 in the morning to watch Force Majeure at a film festival in Belgium, running on a combination of jetleg and a strong Americano. The movie’s subtitles were in French only, and mon français est bon mais pas super. Still, I sat enrapt, dumbfounded and aghast. Read More
Only one movie has ever managed to recreate that uniquely Dickens magic, achieving it not so much through adaptation as through transmutation. Read More
Sleeping with Other People marries the sexual frankness of 21st-century rom-coms to the wry, literate wit of classic Nora Ephron—and the human honesty of great movies in all eras. Read More
Rick Alverson's 2012 film The Comedy is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a piece of filmmaking that critiques the very game it plays. Read More
As I watched Twin Peaks: The Return each week, I couldn’t help but recall the words of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” Read More