posts Archives - Page 2 of 138 - Bright Wall/Dark Room

For most of Spielberg’s career, science fiction has been the mechanism through which he learns and teaches empathy. But in Disclosure Day, empathy itself is the speculative leap. The genre function is inverted: science fiction stops speculating about aliens and starts speculating about us. Aliens are ordinary. Human compassion is extraordinary. The sci-fi is us.

Immersed and Submerged: Lucrecia Martel’s Nuestra Tierra (2025)

Ryan Bedsaul·

New Releases

Lucrecia Martel’s new documentary feature Nuestra Tierra is a portrait of a particular community on a particular plot of land in a particular municipality, but it opens in the non-descript vacuum of space.

Double Features: The Whole World’s On Fire

Sarah Welch-Larson·

Double Features Extras

The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and The Insider (1999) bookend the history of the United States from Michael Mann’s perspective. Though their circumstances are worlds apart, their stories expose the history of America.

O My Body

Russell Nichols·

Issue 146: 1976

In 1976's imagined version of 2274, do Black people exist? According to Logan’s Run, you’d think the answer is no.

Prom Threat: Carrie and the Uneasy Legacy Of the Outcast Queen

Bryan Miller·

Issue 146: 1976

Can Carrie White simultaneously be the hero and the monster? The clues lie in what has been jettisoned in an otherwise faithful adaptation from page to screen. By removing the conventional protagonist, the adaptation takes on ominous new implications and truly becomes a Brian De Palma film.

It Is And It Isn’t: On John Carpenter, Schrödinger’s Cat, and Assault on Precinct 13

Elizabeth Cantwell·

Issue 146: 1976

It’s not just the idea that the station = a box that’s compelling me to draw these maybe obtuse, maybe overly-academic, maybe seemingly random connections. John Carpenter has built these ideas of superposition and coexisting states into the very thematic structure of Assault on Precinct 13.

You Just Had to Make Something: An Interview with Harry Dodge & Silas Howard

Payton McCarty-Simas·

Interviews

"Because success was nowhere in sight, we kind of couldn't fail. There were no expectations; nobody was going to do anything for us. We could complain, but who would listen? You just had to make something. So we did! We made our own cafés, our own bands, our own record labels, our own movies, and it was great."

The Body and the Blood

Greg Cwik·

Issue 146: 1976

Alice, Sweet Alice isn't a theological statement. Not solely. It doesn't posit lazy anti-Catholic bloviations or make the faithful into fools; it uses the imagery, the fables, the metaphors as inspiration for making a smartly, sickly compelling narrative of wickedness and the tragedy of tainted innocence.

Remember When You Were Hungry?

Lindsey Romain·

Issue 146: 1976

Watching All the President’s Men in 2026 provokes a gentle aching because it documents an ecosystem of institutional faith that no longer exists—that truth, once uncovered, possesses the power to shift the world.

Some Guy in an Ape Suit: On Why the ‘76 Kong is Good, Actually

Amber Sparks·

Issue 146: 1976

To my mind, the 1976 version succeeds better than any other Kong remake, simply because it understands one key idea: King Kong is a story about an ape.

Double Features: Tall Tales of the Old West

Sarah Welch-Larson·

Double Features Issue 146: 1976

We tell ourselves we’re individuals, beholden to no one, even as we’re shaped by our circumstances. We think of ourselves as the main character. We print the legend. Both Josey Wales and Keoma embody that sense of individualism—and, intentionally or not, their respective movies bear the weight of the contradiction at the heart of being an American.

Florida Man

Travis Woods·

Issue 145: Comedy Happy Place

Inasmuch as Wild Things uses the humid deliria of South Florida to serve as a representative paradigm for the vulgar desperation of American life as a whole, so too does it presciently use Sam Lombardo to presage the “Florida Man” trope of the 21st century—maniacal, insanely confident men who make headlines by getting self-ensnared in bizarre, Rube Goldbergian schemes of their own making, men whose unflagging confidence in their own intelligence blinds them from their own blood-simple naivety.