|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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. Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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. Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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. Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|Eli Holm| Nobody does credits like Hitchcock. His masterpiece Marnie opens with a story book-style credit sequence, flipping through pages of cast member names with the always evolving score dominating the soundscape. Studying a single frame of the credits… Continue reading
|Luke Mosher| Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel The Trial begins like this: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” There it is—the whole maddening tale, captured in a sentence. Continue reading
