|Rowan Smith| When I first started getting more seriously interested in movies, around age thirteen, it was when video stores were on the precipice of catastrophe, though we didn’t know it yet. The business had already largely homogenized, people mostly rented from large chains… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| A central moment in David Lean’s Brief Encounter that jumps out are these words by its protagonist. “I’ve fallen in love. I’m an ordinary woman. I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.” This little bit of narration is at once melodramatic… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| A foundational memory of mine is sitting in Dr. Doug Julien’s “Comedy Text and Theory” course at the University of Minnesota and realizing the slender thin line that separates a scream from a laugh. Dr. Doug, as he liked to be addressed, told the class he was… Continue reading
|Nate Logsdon| A man and a woman, dressed formally and speaking properly, sit in a crowded restaurant and mock the efforts of a string trio supplying background music to the chattering lunch crowd. The camera zeroes in on an earnest, bespectacled cellist, whom… Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| The scene begins at the opera. Arriving late, Anna (Nicole Kidman) and her fiancé Joseph (Danny Huston) push their way intrusively past a dozen audience members. Once seated, the shot holds on Anna’s face for over two minutes, an image director… Continue reading
|Patrick Clifford| In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected to be the 40th President of these United States. Among other things, Ronny and his wife Nancy were to become the figureheads of the War on Drugs with a PSA campaign that told America to “Just Say No.” Also in 1980, Ken… Continue reading
|Kevin Obsatz| How do you go from Network to Altered States? According to a biography about the screenwriter of both films, Paddy Chayefsky (Mad As Hell by Paddy Considine), it sounds like life in New York in the mid-1970s was about as good as it can possibly get for… Continue reading
|Chris Ryba-Tures| If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already know something about One Cut of the Dead. If you’ve seen it, you don’t need me to tell you how special it is, nor would you want me spoiling it. An unassuming genre-bender like this, packed to the gills… Continue reading
|Cole Seidl| Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead has been incredibly, yet quietly, influential since its initial release in Japan in 2017. It has spawned a small independent film movement in Japan known as “nagamawashi” films (or “long take” films) which aim to exploit the… Continue reading
|Amelia Foster & Luis Lopez| If everyone has answered the desert island question as part of a misguided workplace seminar or first date gone wrong, then this John Goodman scenario can be your new barometer for whether they get a second date or you’ll be working from home… Continue reading
