|Doug Carmoody| Alfred Hitchcock’s British films trade heavily in spycraft and international intrigue, but lightly in specificity. Each of The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and Sabotage feature spy rings embedded in Britain, dedicated to extracting British secrets or… Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| For better or worse, the Western is the quintessential American myth from its beginnings with The Great Train Robbery (1903) through the films of John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. During the Western’s heyday in the first half of the 1900s, the nineteenth… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| “Shuffle the cards, and deal a new round of poker hands: they differ in every way from the previous round, and yet it is the same pack of cards, and the same game, with the same spirit, the players grim-faced and silent, surrounded by a haze of tobacco-…” Continue reading
|Reid Lemker| If you learn one thing after watching Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 film Suspicion, it should be this: don’t ever go out with a guy that refers to you as “Monkeyface.” I don’t care where they are from, how much money they claim they have, or even if they look like a young… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” Joseph Heller famously wrote in his 1961 wartime satire Catch-22. Taking place during World War II and reveling in the titular paradoxes inherent in the very concepts of warfare and military service… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread tops my shortlist of “Unexpectedly Rewatchable Movies.” On the initial viewing, the film is obviously beautiful, perfectly acted, painstakingly art directed. And yet, it’s an enigma: what is… Continue reading
|Kit Stookey| When I first watched Punch-Drunk Love, I treated it like a horror movie, viewing parts of it between just-parted fingers. It was film as punishment. I had made my partner watch Shiva, Baby and experience all of its Gen-Z Jewish awkwardness. Now, he wanted to show… Continue reading
|Nazeeh Alghazawneh| “You know how you get rid of crabs? You got to shave one testicle. All the crabs go over to the other testicle, you got to light the hair on fire on that one. When they all go scurrying out, you take an ice pick and you fucking stab every single last one of them!”… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| When The Master came out in 2012, a lot of the conversation centered around Scientology–which made sense, at least at first. “Auteur Wunderkind Attacks World’s Most Litigious Religion!” makes for a pretty compelling headline. “Auteur Wunderkind Explores Identity… Continue reading
|David Potvin| Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 magnum opus Magnolia is sonically chaotic. There’s no two ways about it. Within the first eleven minutes we meet no less than nine members of the film’s ensemble cast amidst a cacophony of these characters’ morning routines… Continue reading
