| Jake Rudegeair | Prepare to have your heart curdled and pressed. Prepare to have your nervous system rattled like a corpse-black skeleton in a crossroads cage. Elem Klimov’s last masterpiece COME AND SEE is cinema in the raw. It’s caustic, an aching descent into the ugliest, most engrossing… Continue reading
| Chris Polley | I barely understood what a lawyer was as a teen in the 90s. I especially never thought I’d end up marrying one. The major reference points I had were all from TV and movies: I loyally watched The Practice even as ABC kept messing with its time slot… Continue reading
| Matthew Christensen | Twelve years ago, I was living in my parents’ basement. I was 44 and living in my parents’ basement. It was not a great moment for me. I had come back to the Twin Cities after a very fulfilling four years teaching at a high school in Turkey, a place whose… Continue reading
|Matt Clark| The crime film and the heist picture have been integral to American cinema since its earliest days: gangster films of the 30s, noir of the 40s and 50s, even silent pictures like The Great Train Robbery (1903) still reverberate powerfully through our shared cinematic vocabulary… 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
|Kit Stookey| When I first watched Punch-Drunk Love, I treated it like a horror movie, viewing parts of it between just-parted fingers. It was film as punishment. I had made my partner watch Shiva, Baby and experience all of its Gen-Z Jewish awkwardness. Now, he wanted to show… Continue reading
| MH Rowe | It qualifies neither as an obscure bit of Hollywood trivia nor as a famous declaration of aesthetic taste, but you may or may not happen to know that the director Paul Thomas Anderson once went on at length in an interview… Continue reading
|Nazeeh Alghazawneh| “You know how you get rid of crabs? You got to shave one testicle. All the crabs go over to the other testicle, you got to light the hair on fire on that one. When they all go scurrying out, you take an ice pick and you fucking stab every single last one of them!”… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| Like many self-described “film nerds”, I grew up with a great admiration for the work of Billy Wilder. Around the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I was watching Sunset Boulevard monthly, completely enraptured by the witty dialogue, the strangeness of it… Continue reading
| Dan McCabe | Baz Luhrmann isn’t your typical “great” filmmaker. His style hits audiences like a jackhammer. Moulin Rouge! (2001) is technically a period drama, but you could be forgiven for thinking the period was the 1990s and not the 1890s… Continue reading
