|Luke Mosher| Béla Tarr’s slow cinema masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) is a bleak and beautiful experience. It is exactly the kind of film that repertory theaters like Trylon were designed for. During the nearly 2.5 hour run time, you can’t check your phone or get distracted by your dog; you must sit in the theater and reckon with it… Continue reading
|Azra Thakur| Four or five years ago, a colleague and I went out for lunch in downtown Saint Paul. We’d started our jobs within a couple of months of each other and were new to working in Lowertown, trying to find vegetarian-friendly restaurants to get a break from bringing… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| 0. The Fool. I’ve always had a thing for weird little freaks. They’re exactly what they sound like: people whose behavior is absurd or unsettling. They have complicated relationships with subjects like sex, drugs, and religion. They can be repressed or unhinged… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| Nine years ago, as is the American way, a viral car commercial brought us all together. Advertising Volvo’s state-of-the-art dynamic steering, it showed a chiseled man in his 50s atop two large trucks, his stance wide and firm, with one foot planted on each of the behemoths’… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| In film, physiognomy is destiny. Because this is so, the face of Yves Montand is perfectly suited for a destiny shared by so many men and women in mid-century dramas, from Hollywood and beyond: being tired. The tiredness of Montand in Alain Resnais’s La Guerre est finie (1966… Continue reading
|Luke Mosher| This essay contains spoilers for the film Z. Costa-Gavras’s 1969 film Z is a fictionalized account of the 1963 assassination of the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis by the Greek government. The title refers not to our English Z but the Greek letter Zeta, which protesters… Continue reading
|Alex Kies| World historian Herman Schumacher graduates from college into a shot-on-video split-level nightmare. His family won’t return his calls, his old friends don’t like him anymore. He works, dressed in a shirt and tie, digging holes in the forest. His girlfriend might be cheating… Continue reading
|Natalie Marlin| Toward the end of the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, set in 1985, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg visits a dying Roy Cohn, the prosecutor responsible for her execution in a legal witch hunt against her and her husband in the early 1950s, to haunt him in his final… Continue reading
|Azra Thakur| It’s hard to believe Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971) was released over fifty years ago. Its iconic first scene is still exciting to watch today: from far above, we see John Shaft emerging from a New York City subway staircase to the cold winter outside, set to Isaac Hayes’s… Continue reading
|Chelli Riddiough| What’s iconic about Shaft? The theme song. The beige turtleneck and brown pleather trench coat. The sideburns and afro. The $50-an-hour detective fee. The fact that detectives are called “dicks.” The terrible one-liners lauded as wisecracks. The unnecessary sexual Continue reading
