Movies

The Running Man (1987) is weird comfort food. I find myself craving every now and then, like a favorite meal. I first saw it when I was twelve, and nostalgia tends to tint objectivity, but I think this movie only improves with age. They don’t make them like this

The Night of the Hunter opens with the disembodied heads of five children floating in the cosmos and gets weirder from there.

Last night I watched Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a film I hadn’t seen since my days in college. I remember it filling me with a particular and nameless kind of dread, and this mood has been on my mind lately: the overlapping of global calamity with the tragedies of our

Federico Fellini’s 8½ is a head-scraping, memory-swirled portrait of the judgment and shame that comes with creative effort. Tonight it speaks heavy to my desire for clarity, how I worry time is running out for me to find some niche or single point of focus: Could you leave everything

A double feature. First up, Nightcrawler. Dan Gilroy’s 2014 neo-noir follows a man without conscience who prowls the Los Angeles night, hunting for footage of fresh accidents and violence to sell to the local news. He approaches his work with the gusto of an auteur: nosing his camera into

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, a woman disappears on a rocky island. Her wealthy friends search for her until it begins to rain. They pace empty rooms. They speak in non-sequiturs and nod off mid-conversation. They stare at the ceiling and count. They are bored out of their skulls,

A friend sent me an article about a helmet you can buy that creates its own microclimate of filtered, customized air. It inspired me to rewatch Safe, Todd Haynes’s 1995 film about a woman who becomes allergic to the modern world and maybe her life. She develops nosebleeds and

Max Headroom holds up far too well thirty-five years later. Every few years, I think about the 1987 signal hijacking at a Chicago television station when an unknown man wearing a Max Headroom mask took over the airwaves to mutter nonsense. (The Wikipedia entry includes this delightful sentence: “The video

This season is shaped by muted Bergman films projected on the wall in the hour of the wolf. I can’t shake the first six minutes of The Silence: a bored woman lounges and sweats in a stuffy train car. Another woman coughs and moans, suffering a mysterious illness. A

I woke up with Melancholia on my mind. Six days after watching it, I cannot shake the airless world of this film that lives between calamity and silence. The Earth is about to collide with a mammoth planet hiding behind the sun, yet the volume is turned down to a

Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is the best film I’ve seen in years. Built from red neon, broken clocks, haunted karaoke, and endless rain, it’s a puzzle that will never be solved—and it perfectly captures the architecture of dreams and the looping logic

Blade Runner is a story about god, a fever dream about grabbing your creator by the throat.