Drive My Car suggests that art itself is a vehicle for both communication and self-exploration. It can communicate what cannot be said out loud, if we are willing to listen, and can also be the vessel through which we better understand who we are.
Whatever Bo Burnham’s Inside is—a stand-up routine, a television special, a piece of musical theater, a music album, a documentary, a cinematic selfie, a confession—I think it’s cinema.
Licorice Pizza offered me more of the joys of cinema than anything has in years, but I regret its perpetuation of an erasure ironically similar to that practiced in the era Anderson satirizes.
The magic trick of Joanna Hogg’s film is not so much that The Souvenir Part II is funnier or stranger or better than its predecessor: it’s that Part II redefines both films as another form of memoir entirely.
Rewatching Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story will become my winter balm and consolation. I will dream of love for the first time in a long time, and I will weep thinking of how I am ready for it once again.
The very best films and first watches in 2021 from the BW/DR editorial staff.
The great literary twist of Midnight Mass is that, after all that, their salvation is also their sin, and it is entirely earthly, entirely finite.
Undine is a story of the more timeless complications of love, long predating the European cataclysm and sure to outlive our present day.
The illusions of The French Dispatch are wondrous and sweet, and possibly vanishing. This singular setting and this singular filmmaker bolster one another, though, an inevitable convergence of two finely cultivated worlds—the outsider dream of France, and the extended universe of Wes Anderson.
An end of year message to all those who've helped us keep going. (Plus, a playlist too!)
Other, more recent superhero films may claim to be grim—and certainly achieve a gritty, surface-level style—but in Batman Returns, we have something that seems to deliver an underbelly of actual darkness: upsettingly discolored bodily fluids, thrillingly unhealthy psychosexual games, raw fish, toxic sewage, and a semi-catatonic ‘hero’ who barely speaks.
This month on the show, we're joined by poet, educator, and original BW/DR co-conspirator Elizabeth Cantwell to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s (now) beloved psychosexual Christmas thriller, Eyes Wide Shut.
