Category: Film

Wet, Hot, Senile Summer

A consideration of suburbia and its inhabitants in relation to the American Dream.

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Love or Nothing

Shakespeare asks the big questions and sometimes he answers them. In Romeo and Juliet he asks about love, often.

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On Screens & Esteem

One day this summer, sitting in a blank white apartment that was not mine, I felt a strange weariness. This apartment was full of more books than I will probably ever read and I had fellowships to apply to and emails to write and the whole Internet in front of me and all of New York City clamoring outside.

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The Fourth Annual Princeton Independent Film Festival

Narrative as a discourse, and the opportunities within collective interpretation.

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Bone Tomahawk

In a filmmaking era when movies are increasingly designed, focus-tested, and audience-approved to please, “Bone Tomahawk” is strangely refreshing for refusing us our simple pleasures.

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12 Years a Slave

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is tense and unflinching. Its relentless intensity and graphic brutality has been the defining feature in the media, but it is also an essential part of the film and the primary reason it could become the most important portrait of American slavery yet on camera.

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Left Alone

To escape from society, head for the woods.

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When Your B1tch Becomes Human: A Review of My Dog Tulip

“If Ackerley perceives his dependent, female dog as essentially human, this is a strong statement regarding Ackerley’s beliefs about women in general. In fact, many of his statements regarding Tulip, throughout the film, feel steeped in misogyny, given that they are not statements generally associated with dogs.”

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Sorry to Bother You review

“What the story lacks in cohesion and clarity, though, it makes up for in inventiveness and provocation. It seems intentionally on-the-nose that the protagonist’s name is “Cash Green,” as the film takes the inherent absurdity and selfishness of capitalism to the extreme.”

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A History of Silence: Elision and Destruction in the New Mexican Landscape

“There’s power in not having to care. As Inez Guzmán remarks, the film Oppenheimer can leave New Mexico just as its subject did: apparently without a second thought. But there’s also power—more ambivalent, yes, but also more lasting—that comes with needing to pick up the pieces.”

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America from Afar

Roman Polanski has lived one of the most fascinating lives of the last century, though it would be hard to call it “good.” Such a title ought to be reserved for more pleasant, straightforward existences that perhaps begin modestly and … Read More

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Spring Breakers

Spring Breakers arrived in theaters last Friday only to confuse audiences around the country. The film begins practically pornographically, bare breasts splashed with beer and tan rears occupying the entire movie screen, accompanied by the aggressive sounds of Skrillex. It then flashes forward to the mundane and fictitious Kentucky College where four girls find they don’t have enough money to fund a spring break getaway to Florida.

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