|Rowan Smith| Despite my strong desire to fight against the impulse throughout my teens and twenties, I’ve always been governed more by emotion than logic. I cannot deny that I become bloodthirsty when I am wronged, despite the god knows how many revenge-centric films...

|Becky Welander| I was re-watching some of the early seasons of Project Runway recently, discovering that in Season 6, Episode 7, Michael Kors comments with disgust that one of the designs looked like a librarian from 1979. Michael Kors is certainly not the first or the last person...

|Yuval Klein| Viewers are immediately inundated with the multitudinous clamor of pre-production for an independent French film. It is somewhat humorous, somewhat curious, and somewhat stress-inducing. Then, Maggie Cheung enters the room.

|Eli Holm| Some of the earliest films in the cinematic canon have acquired an elevated status; they’re put on a pedestal and deemed immortal pieces of art and influence. But I'm not here to talk about these products, I'm here to talk about the process. That's what director Olivier Assayas does...

|MH Rowe| The most important thing in a Sam Peckinpah western is the automobile. Cars are the essential metaphor, at least when it comes to his crudely grand and murderous epic The Wild Bunch (1969), but also when you consider his first classic film Ride the High Country...

|Azra Thakur| I watched my first Maggie Cheung film, In the Mood for Love (2000), near the start of the pandemic at home. I didn’t read much about it beforehand (the best way to watch films) and was mesmerized as Maggie Cheung appeared scene after scene in print after gorgeous print...

|Casey Jarrin| The erotics of a single finger / pressing the doorbell / slowly / Quiet intimacies of space / slender hands graze / a forgotten doorframe / Wardrobes / lifted by ropes / A slash of fabric / midnights of rain / Every frame: a sigh / a wish held close / a silent exchange.

|Sophie Durbin| Bennie (Warren Oates) drives across the Mexican countryside in a sweaty white suit stained with blood and dirt. Gasping for air, he swats flies from his passenger, a decaying human head in a burlap sack. He’s speaking to the head as if it’s the most normal...

|Lucas Hardwick| Everyone has a head and we’re all kind of obsessed with them; so obsessed, in fact, that the conceit of removing it forcefully will never not be the most macabre form of dismemberment. After all, decapitation was a rather popular crime deterrent in the Dark Ages.

|Finn Odum| Since the dawn of time—which began either in a rural Tennessee farmhouse or a rented duplex in Milwaukee—I have been a movie person. My early childhood memories overlap with scenes from A Bug’s Life, A Night at the Opera, and Air Bud. Some of the...

|Jake Rudegeair| Forget everything you know about The Princess Bride. It won’t be easy. Rob Reiner’s hilarious classic from 1987 is fused to our collective filmic memory like a sixth finger. It would be like asking you to forget your favorite grade school teacher or your first crush.

|Lucas Vonasek| It’s New Year’s Eve, 1972. You find yourself on a luxurious cruise ship steaming somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean. The chandelier in the ballroom swings over your head in concert with the blue and heaving water that’s turning more and more brumous...