| Jared Meyer | Ingmar Bergman was the first filmmaker who made me realize you can film the invisible. While first discovering my love of film and beginning my practice as a filmmaker, Bergman’s films broke open my perception of movies as entertainment, that they could be just as complex a probing… Continue reading
| Ben Tuthill | The Physical Education department at St. Paul Central made the inspired decision in the mid-2000s to screen Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream as the capstone to the anti-drug unit of sophomore-year health class. We needed… Continue reading
|Anjali Moore| Since I have always held a compulsive devotion to 1970s media and coming-of-age films, I ventured to the cinema to see Licorice Pizza with relatively high hopes when it was first released in 2021. I felt like Licorice Pizza might pierce my general disaffection for PTA… 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
|Malcolm Cooke| Steven Larsen and Peter Bruhn met through their mailman. An avid sports fan, he assumed that two men hailing from Wisconsin must be Packers fans and encouraged them to meet. But when they finally got together to watch… Continue reading
|Olivia Fredrickson| The cinema of Maya Deren without a doubt captures not only the intrinsic reflections of her consistently shifting identity as a woman and artist, but also the labyrinthic inner workings of the self and psyche. Both of these crucial elements of her cinema and identity… Continue reading
|Andy Strudevant| The depth of annoyance that a lot of movie people felt about this subject is a little harder to parse from a quarter-century later, because I think movie people are supposed to be a little bit more broad-minded and populist these days. But man, it’s worth remembering… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| Eons ago (in 2019), when I was but a spritely, youthful child (20 and in college), I wrote about the 1984 controversial Claus classic Silent Night, Deadly Night. Back in the days of zinger conclusions and quippy comments on Santa Claus’s sanctity, I had dreams… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| On Dangerous Ground (1951) might appear at first to be one of the more unbearably melodramatic film noirs ever produced. Its ending, or really the ending of the ending—the film’s final scene—threatens especially to pull all that has preceded it down into the depths of pure… Continue reading
|Steve Rybin| The Trylon’s “Ozu in Color” series presents four of Yasujirō Ozu’s color films made near the end of the director’s career (1958 to 1963). These films cover what is for Ozu familiar narrative ground: fathers and mothers give away daughters to marriage; generational conflicts pit… Continue reading
