A maxim sometimes encountered in film writing — and one espoused in the transcript that follows — is the notion that a film teaches an…
In Annihilation, Florida writer Jeff VanderMeer writes, “When you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.” That novel’s…
Maybe Our Land, Lucrecia Martel’s new film, reminds me of Edits, Chuquimamani-Condori’s 2025 laptop dump of DJ edits, simply because I listened to the latter…
One thing left uncertain: just who are Dorothy Gale’s parents? I don’t quite mean that literally, though the overgrown Oz extended universe probably has an…
Sandwiched between the populist comedy of Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and the lurid fantasia machinery of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1990), Coppola returned…
The release of a new Tim Burton film prompts any number of critical referendums on the filmmaker’s work and legacy. For critics of a certain…
To its considerable credit, Stephen Soucy’s recent documentary, Merchant Ivory (2024), resists the tendency toward hagiography. It’s an understandably tempting opportunity, composed as the film…
At a moment of especially heightened anxiety occurring — when else? — during Shabbat dinner, one of Between the Temples’ wiser characters offers a parable…
First, the camera presents a world for the song to take place in. A spike of sky above a statue that reaches upward forever, a…
Over the course of a single night, two couples trade psychic and physical blows over shared and shattered illusions about the business of connection in…
Like an oak presiding over what came before and what might follow, Kier-La Janisse’s documentary study Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021) roots folk horror…
Where does a song come from? And how does it happen? In November 2021, driven back inside to obsess about air particles again thanks to…
Late in Mary Chase’s Pulitzer-winner, Harvey, the theme of the play is delivered by — who else? — a salty cab-driver. The aptly-named E.J. Lofgren…
The film begins with a man and a tripod. He swivels, shifts his body, scrutinizes the line. He’s not making moving pictures, living as he…
Maybe more than any of its brethren of subgenre monsters, the exorcism film The Exorcist (1973) looms large over its brood of descendants. There are…
s1e1 – “Pilot” I have been thinking about Robin Wood and playing foxtail in a front yard that smelled like Sugar Maple leaves and garage…
The first onscreen image in Faceless After Dark (2023), is, perhaps in deliberate tension with the film’s title, a human face. It is bloodied, or…
A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier — in the film, from…