Features
Two women try to make philosophical and moral sense of the increasingly confusing world in which they live in this week's pair of films, which speak across centuries and countries.
The corrections center actually functions as a reprieve for many of these women, who went from abusive childhoods straight into abusive marriages when they were as young as 12. The fact that a male filmmaker is let into this world shows their trust of him.
Two writers dive into the deep, red waters of genre.
The dog days of this particularly dogged summer are getting to this week's pair of writers, who retreat to summer visions in which youthful expectation and adult anxiety make for fellow lazy sunbathers.
The Paramount is the first theater I formed an attachment to for a reason other than it being a nearby multiplex. I have inevitable nostalgia for a space I haven’t entered in a decade: I don’t need to see it in person again to realize the lobby was even smaller than I probably registered.
This week’s pair of writers semi-escape from their respective realities in São Paulo and New York by entering worlds of noir-ish fatalism and ironic hope with Kaurismäki and Truffaut.
“Hit” movies have largely been eradicated from my theater-going diet—a rather cleansing effect. Yet I find myself missing that view from the balcony, the feeling of peering down at those churning, sexless spectacles, and the slightly melancholic indifference of it all.
This week’s critics come together to officially put a nineties lesbian coming-of-age comedy and a sixties Hong Kong musical romance in the queer canon.
There is a difference between making a film of sociopolitical and cultural value and making a film about important sociopolitical and cultural matters. In some cases the latter may beget the former, but it is not a given.
At peak attendance, I was averaging three screenings a week, sometimes with a date or with girlfriends, but just as often alone. Unfettered by school, an uncertain future, or the world at large, I would plop myself down fourth row center. Just me, my popcorn, a sketchbook, and my feelings.
This week's pair of writers raise questions about contemporary pedagogy and parenting, sci-fi and fairy tales, isolation and ash, with an R-rated future parable and a trip back to storybook land.
From our archives: writing on films that have been on our minds, featuring Ela Bittencourt, Ashley Clark, Michael Koresky, Joanne Kouyoumjian, Emma Piper-Burket, Jeff Reichert, Genevieve Yue, Farihah Zaman, and more.
There is that split-second of darkness. In the cinema, it comes between the last trailer and the film you came for. In the theater, just after the house lights dim completely. It is a feeling of being on the threshold of something unknowable.
On the surface, the four films are vastly different in both subject matter and approach, yet an unexpected sense of unity forms when they are viewed together.