|Dan Howard| My first foray into Bong Joon-Ho’s unparalleled cinematic mind was at the very start of the COVID-19 shutdown. While confined to my home like everyone else, I took the opportunity to catch up on some movies I hadn’t seen, and Parasite was one of the first films… Continue reading
|Cole Seidl| Paranoia is mainstream again. Since September 11th, 2001, the American collective unconscious has been building towards a degree of paranoiac saturation unseen since the golden age of conspiratorial thinking in the 1970s. On September 16th, 2001, Susan Sontag published Continue reading
|Matthew Lambert| Strange Days Holds the Niche Noir Title Belt. Can you remember the first noir you ever saw? Let me guess, did it star Humphrey Bogart? For the most part, people understand what makes noir films one of the most popular genres in cinematic history: a private… Continue reading
|Azra Thakur| Four or five years ago, a colleague and I went out for lunch in downtown Saint Paul. We’d started our jobs within a couple of months of each other and were new to working in Lowertown, trying to find vegetarian-friendly restaurants to get a break from bringing… Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) is my Die Hard. It is a Christmas movie, and I defend it as such with my life. Every year since I first saw it in 2007, I trot it out in December alongside the standard fare like A Charlie Brown Christmas and Love Actually. One could… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| When distilled down to one sentence, the plot of The Long Good Friday might go something like this: “An English gangster, two American businessmen, and some Irish nationalists all have a very bad day.” It reads like the opener to a deadpan joke at a party full of… Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| As hard as we pleaded and begged, we couldn’t get mom to take us to Blockbuster every day. In the 90s, we had to rely on the cabinet VHS collection, stuffed with ancient treasures like Key Largo, Terminator 2, and taped copies of whatever dad… Continue reading
|Timothy Zila| When we meet Sam Lowry, the protagonist of Brazil, he’s flying. High above the clouds, clothed in a plastic-looking breast piece borrowed from a cosplayer’s wardrobe and feathery wings fit for a campy theater production. There is no clear purpose in his flight— Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| One could argue that every Terry Gilliam film is a magnum opus—Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, even Lost in La Mancha feels like a definitive statement about human nature in which Gilliam serves as… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| 0. The Fool. I’ve always had a thing for weird little freaks. They’re exactly what they sound like: people whose behavior is absurd or unsettling. They have complicated relationships with subjects like sex, drugs, and religion. They can be repressed or unhinged… Continue reading
