A different lens on film. An independent, reader-supported, online film journal since 2013.
Current issue: 1999 (Issue #129) | Current podcast: Mississippi Masala (with Mitchell Beaupre)
Header art…
Every film covered in our sixty-seventh issue, Best of 2018, first published in January 2019.
Every film covered in our sixty-sixth issue, Food, first published in December 2018.
Every film covered in our sixty-fifth issue, Ingmar Bergman, first published in November 2018.
Every film covered in our sixty-fourth issue, The Uncanny, first published in October 2018.
Every film and limited series covered in our sixty-third issue, Work, first published in September 2018.
Every film covered in our sixty-second issue, Body, first published in August 2018.
Adapted from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, Let the Sunshine In is an aptly fragmentary study of dating as a two-stop ferry between hope and disappointment. Juliette Binoche is irresistible as reluctant passenger Isabelle, but irresistibility—like career accomplishment, or good judgment, or instructive life experience—gives little protection from romantic temptation, which is to say, romantic disenchantment. Thigh high patent boots haven’t looked so natural since Julia Roberts’ prostitute cosplay in Pretty Woman. Ticking promisingly across the floor or sticking awkwardly…
Before a chainsawed, magenta-bled hell floods Mandy’s insular realm of tranquility and follows the moody, gossamer aching of the film’s first hour with a synapse-shredding panegyric to ‘80s action-horror and revenge films in its second; before fantasy artist Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) is spied upon by Children of the New Dawn cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) and kidnapped by his LSD-corrupted necrobiker monstrosities; before Mandy’s partner, Red Miller (Nicolas Cage), is forced to watch her burn to death for…
Esti lurks in the margins for much of the first half of the film, deprived of agency and yet the covert inciter of incidents. It was she, we learn, who informed Ronit of her father’s death, prompting her return. It is she who finally catches Ronit alone and goes with her to her deceased father’s home—where they reminisce of their romance as girls, the forbidden love that led to Ronit’s exile. Their attraction builds, though their confidence in their desires…
Afew years ago, a group of scientists published a study on screaming: the effects it has on those who hear it, and the type of screams that sound most fearful. “Scream science,” they called it. “A new kind of science.” The scientists had subjects listen to various screams and then judge them based on how afraid the screamer sounded. The rougher the scream, they found, the quicker that scream went straight to the listener’s amygdala, the brain’s fear center, and…
For Black girls, the boundaries of humanity are a constantly pressing issue. Black girlhood has always existed as a threat. The old tropes developed to dehumanize Black women rear their ugly heads time and again, such as the Jezebel, meant to suggest that Black women and girls are uniquely promiscuous, existing only for someone else’s pleasure, but never for themselves. The threat of Black girlhood is all too clear; the media talks of Black children as grown adults and Black…
I wasn’t a quiet kid, exactly, but I’ve always been shy. My mother told me once, trying to be encouraging, Just don’t do that voice you do, the one you think people will like. I knew the voice she meant—high-pitched, fluttering with nervous breath, manically polite with a constant edge of nervous laughter—and I wanted to cry. I don’t do it because I think people will like it. It’s just the noise that comes out of a body I can’t…
Imagine, if you will, the classic zombie figure as a metaphor for queer shame. Picture shame fisting through the dirt prison you made for it, stalking the framework of your home until it stumbles into your bedroom with a mighty groan. Now, picture shame’s rotten teeth sinking into you, forcing you to stare wide-eyed into that gruesome, maggot-slicked mouth. Try and feel that monstrous weight inside your body as it convulses and transforms into the shame you so desperately tried to keep out.
-- Spencer Williams, Summer Camp Shame and Self-Loathing
I don’t know whether The Mule will be Eastwood’s final film, either in front of or behind the camera. But it sure feels like it. The preoccupation with mortality suffuses the film’s every moment. As Earl Stone, a 90-year-old horticulturist with mounting bills and shaky family relationships who agrees to become a cartel drug mule, Eastwood moves through the film like the old man he is. His every hunchbacked step carries with it the ghosts of tall-walking, stoic anti-heroes of…