Photosensitivity Warning: Several scenes in Scarlet may prove triggering for photosensitive viewers through the use of stylized lightning. It occurs a handful of times in the film and can often be predicted, enabling a viewer to shield oneself, but it’s… Read More ›
Of all the terms to be used to describe media consumption, “guilty pleasure” should be stricken from the record. The phrase implies that, regardless of perceived quality, the thing itself is not good in some way and that the enjoyment… Read More ›
Hamnet, the new feature and novel adaptation from Oscar-winning filmmaker Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), is coming available on home video in both digital and physical formats. Starring Jessie Buckley (Women Talking) and Paul Mescal (Aftersun) as Agnes and William Shakespeare, respectively,… Read More ›
In the opening shot of Magellan (2025), an Indigenous Malaysian woman walks into a stream, filling a vessel. Suddenly, she spots a white man past the fourth wall of the proscenium and takes off running. She shouts through her village… Read More ›
Two prisoners. Two different pasts. One love story that keeps them going. Set within the Brazilian military dictatorship, Héctor Babenco’s 1985 film Kiss of the Spider Woman (adapted by Leonard Schrader, based on Manuel Pieg’s 1976 novel) is about two… Read More ›
Life is like a dyad-god, both finite and infinite. Your life is finite because it ends, but Life goes on regardless of how you live yours. Few things narrow as quickly as the infinite possibilities of a newborn’s life, except… Read More ›
If you’ve never seen a Jonathan Glazer film before, his second feature may be his most accessible in terms of content and execution. Birth (2004) is weird and unsettling, but not in the same ways as Under the Skin (2013)… Read More ›
Born in Paris, French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski initially planned to be a teacher and graduated from École Normale Supérieure before earning an Agrégation higher degree in literature. Then she joined the screenplay department of La Fémis and met several students… Read More ›
When the world first stopped to hear the voice of Hind Rajab, the little girl from Gaza hiding from bullets in her family’s car, Kaouther Ben Hania was standing frozen in the airport. Now, she’s delivered a masterpiece that asks… Read More ›
Director Derek Cianfrance is a filmmaker who is near and dear to my heart. His 2013 film The Place Beyond the Pines hit me on a deep emotional level with its themes of fatherhood and legacy. Even with its heavier… Read More ›
“All my memories are movies.” – George Clooney as Jay Kelly in Jay Kelly (2025). As a child born on the cusp of 1981, I reside firmly on line between Gen X and Millennial, meaning that I can remember a… Read More ›
Cinema borrowing from folktales is a natural fit given that folktales often elevate figures or events and cinema does this innately through projection. Who wouldn’t want to see the figures or events of lore cast upon a 40-foot screen or… Read More ›
It didn’t used to feel complicated to be Jewish before October 7th, 2023, and the Israeli-Gaza Conflict began. Having grown up in a Reform Jewish household, I believed in the existence of and even the right of a Jewish state… Read More ›
Asking me to describe my relationship with the Silent Hill franchise is opening a Pandora’s Box of epic proportions. The series, centered around a cursed ghost town in rural Maine, has haunted, compelled, comforted, entertained, frightened, and shaped me in… Read More ›
There’s a common misconception that stories, by nature of being broadcast or shown in a theater, condone behavior, justifying choices, always, simply because they are the behaviors and choices of the main character. This is an egregious failure of media… Read More ›
Adaptations are the bread and butter of entertainment, whether it’s “ripped from the headlines” episodes of some Law & Order spin-off to capture the zeitgeist or the story of an established celebrity. Going further are the adaptations of books which… Read More ›
Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has built an indie career leaning into his eccentricities and mixing his artistic sensibilities. It’s how we get the zombie apocalypse comedy The Dead Don’t Die (2019), the melancholic vampiric love story Only Lovers Left Alive (2013),… Read More ›
The only feeling better for a cinephile in learning that a film you dig or never got the chance to see is getting a physical release is learning that said film that’s out of print or region locked is getting… Read More ›
The Latin phrase “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (roughly translates to “who guards the guardsmen?”) is attributed to Roman poet Juvenal and was made prominent by the philosopher Plato in their work Republic. The phrase has come to be interpreted as… Read More ›
Congratulations. For a certain set of people, this singular word carries weight. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t for the general populous as receiving accolades or cheers often makes one feel elated, but, for a specific set, “Congratulations” correlates… Read More ›