Poster for Chungking Express Famous for its use of the Mamas & the Papas’ song “California Dreamin,’” Jesse Pasternack interprets how Chungking Express evokes the feeling of pop music. When I think of films about pop music, some familiar titles come to mind: A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Stop Making Sense (1984), That Thing You… Read more »
When tragedy strikes and Manuela’s (Cecilia Roth) only child is killed in a car accident, her world crumbles. Learning that her son’s final wish was to know his father — whom she abandoned when she was pregnant 18 years earlier — Manuela returns to Barcelona in search of him, overcoming her grief and becoming the… Read more »
Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling character and operatic psychological study Magnolia follows 10 people whose damaged lives intersect during a single day in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley and boasts a deep bench of phenomenal acting talent, including Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, John C. Riley, William H. Macy, and Jason Robards (in what would… Read more »
Still from Rio Bravo Chris Forrester details how Rio Bravo exemplifies the term of “the hangout film” with its affable characters, softened masculinity, atypical genre tropes, and more. The films of Howard Hawks offer a sampling of many of the cinema’s great genre pleasures — film noirs, musicals, westerns, dramas, comedies, romances, war films. Were… Read more »
Still from Brazil Ben van Welzen explains how genre tropes, the tension between banality and absurdity, overwhelming production design, and more make Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterwork so effective. It’s sure that the world is heading towards dystopia, the only question is when. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four presumed it would be, well, in 1984. However, as… Read more »
V (Hugo Weaving) in V for Vendetta Jesse Pasternack considers the echoes of 2020 that can be found in 2005’s intense — yet still hopeful — dystopian drama V for Vendetta. When people think of 2020, certain words come to mind, like “pandemic,” “quarantine,” “protest,” or “change.” It was a year where people grappled with… Read more »