|Zach Staads| I first saw Don Hertzfeldt’s Everything Will Be OK in my friend’s living room, a cavernous Victorian echo chamber carved from oak and smothered in pink-beige plaster, where we watched on a chunky, green Dell laptop from 2006. Those 17 minutes changed my life. Continue reading
|J.R Jones| Don Hertzfeldt’s characters have always struggled for words. In the opening scene of his hourlong animation It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), the everyman protagonist, Bill, recognizes someone walking toward him on the street and prepares a greeting. But when they pass… Continue reading
|Matthew Christensen| As a kid, we used to play a game called “Statue Maker.” The statue maker would swing two or three kids about; they had to hold the pose they landed in and come up with some character to portray. Other children would play customers, guided about by the statue… Continue reading
|Natalie Marlin| In the dawning hours of the morning, a grocer (Bengal) wakes to the still-blue fading night. The framing is methodical, delicate, but not at all static. The grocer Haruzo’s body stirs from bed, but the camera lingers on his wife Michi (Masako Motai) stirring and rolling… Continue reading
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Unlike coconuts, mangoes, apples, cherimoyas, plantains, and pineapples, everyone knows what to do with a watermelon. Cut and enjoy. They grow in the vast majority of the world from Sweden to Japan, USA to Chile, China to Israel. Perhaps, because of this, watermelons … Continue reading
|Brogan Earney| There’s a lot to admire about The Searchers; the beautiful landscapes, the exhilarating action scenes, the complex characters. It’s all enough to have this film continuously mentioned as one of the greatest ever made, as it should be. The first time I saw the film was just… Continue reading
|Bob Aulert| In 1966, Rock Hudson had been a movie star since the early 1950s—by his mere presence, he could generate the financial support to get a movie made AND then get people to buy tickets to see it. John Frankenheimer had parlayed solid network TV jobs like Playhouse 90… Continue reading
|Hannah Baxter| The Watermelon Woman (1996) is a movie about making a movie about movies—the very definition of meta. The main character, Cheryl, played by writer-director Cheryl Dunye, is steeped in moving pictures. She supports herself videotaping weddings and working… Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| “Coming of age” always struck me as a flat phrase for something so bumpy, so relentless. It doesn’t really illustrate that slow erosion of our bodies and souls as we’re worn down by the slings and arrows of experience, cruelly and carelessly reformed over and over… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| Ugly injustice and righteous anger fill the frames of nearly every fantasy revenge flick, but the best of the genre go beyond the emotion. They consider their targets and punishments carefully as well as provide a convincing argument as to why pacifism… Continue reading
