In William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A., a quintessential Los Angeles crime thriller, artifice reigns, but so too does art.
Whether lost in the pregnant pause of a phantom victory, swamped by the rush of bizarre sex appeal, or struggling with the desire to follow a new best friend but kept back by the ironclad claims of home, Pee-wee understands that dreams are the basis for strange journeys.
Lost gives its audience an interpretation of the Hero’s Journey that goes beyond the sort of mythopoetic checklist we’ve become accustomed to.
The Marquis de Sade was kind of a hack.
Through the Olive Trees is about the melding of two guiding principles: the aching yearn we all have for human companionship, and the knowledge gained by peeking behind the cinematic curtain and seeing ourselves.
Once I noticed the Kimberlys in Nora Ephron’s work, I couldn’t stop noticing them. If we’re accepting Ephron’s own assertion that real-life hurt and heartbreak can be put into fiction with impunity, what did she have against some woman named Kimberly?
One of Naoko Yamada’s most striking and unique traits as a director is her ability to convey the emotional intensity of a love confession, not through bombast or theatrical showiness, but through the startling vulnerability of a genuinely honest conversation.
The weight of family and the sacrifice for a better life in Sam Mendes' Road to Perdition.
Paradise Now provides humanity to the oppressed, even as years of continued violence chip away at their personhood, providing a defense of the disenfranchised and a portrait of damaged resilience that still remains incomparable nearly fifteen years later.
"Based on an actual lie.” That’s how Lulu Wang’s new film The Farewell starts out, before China-born, U.S.-raised Billi (Awkwafina) returns to Changchun as her family prepares to say goodbye to their matriarch Nai Nai, who’s been diagnosed with cancer.
The one catch: Nai Nai doesn’t know she’s sick.
"For all its whimsy, the core of Brigsby Bear is one of simmering hurt—the story of someone forced, at the gentle but firm insistence of people who can’t understand him, to try and move beyond a lifelong trauma that he can only barely recognize as such."
An interview with Kara VanderBijl
