|Ryan Sanderson| When I began this process, I did not know how personal writing about Donnie Darko would feel. It was never one of my favorite films. I was introduced to the film by my freshman roommates alongside a rolling festival of late 90s/early aughts male angst… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| This essay contains spoilers about Donnie Darko. The night I’m writing this is the evening of July third. Five years ago, somewhere between this time that evening and the morning of the fourth, my grandfather Jim passed away. I don’t like fireworks anymore. love will tear us apart… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| When we first started dating, my wife worked at a puzzle room in St. Paul, MN. One of the many perks of such a venture is that I got to play-test rooms occasionally. One such room was heavily influenced by a certain wizarding world created by She-Who-Must-Not-… Continue reading
|Brad Bellatti| For the better part of 15 years, the above image of Chaplin has bothered me. No matter how many times I watch this sequence, the finale of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) shakes me up. I’ve tried many times to find the right words to express this sentiment… Continue reading
|Matthew Christensen| My husband Luka and I have divergent tastes in movies. If I am sitting in the living room watching an old Hollywood musical or a period piece, he takes one look at the television, announces in a mix of Turkish and English, “Tamam. I will be in bed reading a book. Hadi… Continue reading
|Ben Jarman| My mom is back with her take on another film that would normally disinterest her: Godzilla vs. Gigan. My mom never watched Godzilla films with me when I was a kid, but she never stopped me from watching or pretending I was a giant creature in my backyard. A giant to her is… Continue reading
| 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
