Come a little closer and see — you need to inhale. No contemporary filmmaker understands California quite like Paul Thomas Anderson, who throughout his rightfully…
Ah, but first: an introduction. This is the first entry of Flashback, a new column hosted by In Review Online. Here, I play your very…
Socrates: The main question I want to ask is whether a lifetime spent scratching, itching and scratching, no end of scratching, is also a life…
It’s girthy, oversized, gold-encrusted, evocative of pain more than pleasure. No, I’m not talking about the massive enameled penis that makes a couple appearances throughout…
“This language of the unreal, this fictive language which delivers us to fiction, comes from silence and returns to silence.” – Maurice Blanchot, The Space…
It’s worth beginning where a piece like this usually doesn’t, because Munich is the kind of movie Steven Spielberg usually doesn’t make: in a film…
“Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly!” — not a surrealist pamphlet upon obvious improvements to the game…
Josef von Sternberg always had a materialistic streak — it was a necessity to produce the kind of effects he was chasing. He never embraced…
Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy of…
There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s Civil War, in which a man is shot in the heart and killed. The man is from Hong Kong,…
For a film with such a coy name, we necessarily prepare, consenting or not, to play a game of comparison: why did James Benning call…
As Shadow of a Doubt opens, Joseph Cotton’s uncle Charlie is running away from the police. He has been lying down in his cheap hotel…
Watching Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos’ Blood Beat in 2025 is a wild sensory experience. It has the (ahem) beats of a slasher while boasting atmospheric sound design,…
Why do we even watch this movie in the first place? This is one of those scary movies, isn’t it? For years we hear about…
The year before he starred in Witness — Peter Weir’s acclaimed drama about a cop sent to protect a young Amish boy who witnesses a…
William Tell is at once large and small. It is an ambitious adaptation of 19th-century theatre, and it is a bloodthirsty action movie; it is a…
“The art of interpretation is virtually one of translation,”[1] wrote Susan Sontag in 1964. But there is an impulse to resist interpreting that which is…
Put ecclesiastical matters aside, just for the moment, and ask the question: what is a cathedral? What distinguishes a cathedral from a parish church? Having…
I was driving to see the cinema’s latest love story and stopped at a red light. On an empty street, on a cloudless night, I…
‘Behold,’ the Fairy cried, ‘Palmyra’s ruined palaces! Behold where grandeur frowned! Behold where pleasure smiled! What now remains?’ — “Queen Mab,” Book II, 109-13 When…
Jean-Luc Godard was, and still remains, a giant — present as a critic and filmmaker from the halfway point of the last century all the…