Features
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.
In battling with paranoia and insomnia, and trying to make sense of the world, two writers go down separate wormholes—of an Australian faux-documentary horror movie and a Jacques Rivette tumble into conspiracy.
For this week's pair of writers, coping mechanisms including digging into the oeuvres of auteurs, from chronicler of the lonely American male Michael Mann to trailblazing Guadeloupean female filmmaker and activist Sarah Maldoror.
Young women are sick of the status quo in an unfairly forgotten American indie from the nineties and a classic bit of anarchy from the Czech New Wave of the sixties.