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John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in a scene from The Quiet Man (1952) | Republic Pictures

Irish people lay claim to and celebrate The Quiet Man—there’s a whole museum in the village where it was filmed—but just as often, we cringe away from it, anxiously imagining that this is how Americans see us. But the truth is, The Quiet Man is a much bigger deal to us than it could ever be to them.

Watery Returns: Myth and Museums in Christian Petzold’s Undine

Julia Gunnison·

Extras

A slim white woman with red hair stands in front of an overhead view of a city, eyes downcast.

While retaining the essence and many details of the original story, Christian Petzold's Undine (2020) echoes, remixes, and updates pieces of the original tale in a manner likely impossible for an audience to predict—or any other director to have arrived at.

As Much As I’d Like to Stay

Nathaniel Missildine·

Issue 123: Nostalgia

Perhaps I can trace my steps backward and forward, anticipating and restoring the nostalgia, with a little less trepidation thanks to my early time spent with The Big Chill. By the time I reached my own cold fronts, I had the reminder that others had passed this way before.

Episode #30: The Cameraman (1928)

Bright Wall/Dark Room·

Extras Podcast

On our latest mini-episode, Chad and Veronica look at The Cameraman (1928), reflecting on the impossible beauty and precision of Buster Keaton, bodies in motion, and a pantomime scene at Yankees Stadium.

Beside You in Time

Brendan Hodges·

Issue 122: Heists

Tenet is the ultimate expression of Christopher Nolan’s decades-spanning project of capturing subjectivity on screen, conjuring a twilight world where the nature of reality, God, time, right and wrong, and free will, are left in the trenches of ambiguity.

Stealing Reason from God: Theft in Time Bandits and The Fisher King

Griff Maloney·

Issue 122: Heists

If Time Bandits is a child's polemic against greed and selfishness that ultimately ends in the reveal of the truth of the universe, then The Fisher King is a movie in which our hero steals the truth about himself back from the cold hands of the universe and an uncaring God.

Easing the Pain of Betrayal: On Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955)

Jason Christian·

Issue 122: Heists

In this black and white still from Jules Dassin's RIFIFI, five men sit around a table, playing cards, drinking. One has a cigarette in his mouth. All wear fedoras, suit jackets, ties. They look at each other with suspicion.

Rififi was Dassin’s comeback film, his revenge fantasy film, a revenge not only on foes across the pond but on capitalism itself. And what better way to represent militant class struggle than by depicting a team effort to expropriate the ruling class’s most ostentatious emblem: diamonds?

And When It Rains the Rain Falls Down

Frank Falisi·

Issue 122: Heists

By theorizing acting as the vessel by which a genuine self might appear in a moving image, Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon constantly collapses self and other, truth and performance. It generates its own tension.

The People We Used to Be: On Sneakers and Being Young and Dumb

Carrie Courogen·

Issue 122: Heists

Sneakers is a film about a lot of things: ever-advancing modern technology, personal privacy in the earliest days of the digital age, still-frosty international relations of the post-Cold War era, guys being dudes, and the ways in which the American government—to put it broadly—sucks.

Rabbit Rides a Pale Horse

Natalie Marlin·

Issue 122: Heists

This is the first of many subversions in Sexy Beast (2000), Jonathan Glazer’s debut. This is the place where another heist film would end: the comfortable paradise—the idyllic retreat to a luxurious retirement—staked upon the ill-gotten gains earned from a life of theft.

Death, Actually

Mark Dzula·

Issue 122: Heists

While Bonnie and Clyde appropriates the contours and beats of its historical figures’ actual lives, the film uses techniques of elision and abstraction to create a starkly erotic Pop portrait of doomed lovers—and the infinite, tender tension that holds them together.

The Pink Panther’s Women Perform the Real Heist

Suyin Haynes·

Issue 122: Heists

The most captivating aspect of Blake Edwards's The Pink Panther lies with its two female leads, their identities partially obscured, elusive, just beyond our reach—much like the mirage of the eponymous diamond.