Older Films

Interpreting ‘The Shape’ of Halloween

Originally conceived as The Babysitter Murders, the plot for Halloween is actually about as streamlined as that title might suggest. It features several babysitters, a hulking man with a knife, and some murders. But in the hands of any director other than John Carpenter, we wouldn’t still be talking about Halloween forty years later. It is, in fact, one of […]
Barton Fink: The Inferno and the Hypocrite

Writer’s block is hell. You sit, every member of your body frozen, your neurons refusing to fire, your fingers refusing to type — and all the while, the awful blankness of the empty page declines to cease its sneering taunt. You lose sleep, lose sanity; your mind becomes a barren desert, a dry and weary […]
Memento: Truth vs. Happiness

After seeing Inception for the first time in the summer of 2010, Christopher Nolan quickly became my favorite director. Although my enthusiasm has waned over the years, as his films have grown less character driven and more spectacle oriented, I still have a certain fondness for earlier works like Memento.
The Dark Knight

It is easy to write about a bad film, but much harder to write about a good one. Pointing to areas that are lacking is easy, but when you cannot find fault in anything, what do you write about? This is, in part, a consequence of the medium: a good film cannot simply be put into words or else it would not be a good film, only a good story
American Beauty

According to the book Thinking Fast and Slow, it doesn’t take much for us to think something is good. A psychologist ran a study at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University that placed Turkish words (or Turkish sounding words) in the newspapers of each school. For several weeks, words such as kadirga, saricik, biwonjni, nansoma, and iktitaf showed up on […]
Moonstruck

A romantic comedy starring Nicholas Cage and Cher has no business being this good. That tends to be the sentiment, anyhow. But it is this good, and so are they. Cher is lovely as a woman whose frank outlook on life can’t hide a romantic streak. Cage’s mania is expertly channeled, giving him exuberant ideals to proclaim […]
Wild Wild Country: What Is A Cult?

While watching Wild Wild Country, I could not escape the thought that it was a story which could only have happened in the 1980s. To put it all succinctly, in 1981, an Indian guru named Osho (nee Chandra Mohan Jain, nee Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) founded a religion called Rajneeshism which joined Eastern mysticism and Western […]
Bambi

Bambi needs no explanation, no grand thesis or deep thematic explication. It can be understood immediately, not only at the cognitive and emotional levels, but at the most basic: from within the unconscious. It is a story about growing up and coming of age that can be understood by anyone immediately. It is a basic […]
A Nightmare on Elm Street

Imagine, if you will, a perfect American suburb. You know the kind, probably only immortalized on the silver screen or through photography. All the houses are colonial style, possibly Victorian, with white picket fences and freshly mowed grass. The neighborhood’s safe enough for the kids to play without adult supervision, and everyone is familiar with who lives on their block. But scratch that seemingly perfect veneer, and there’s decay under the surface.
Brother Bear

I’ll begin with the bold claim that Brother Bear is one of the finest animated films Disney has produced in the past quarter century. At least, it is one of their most underrated and unappreciated. Granted, I tend to favor a handful of Disney’s supposed flops over a number of their “canonical” hits. I tend to root for underdogs, and perhaps I’m too loyal to films that left a deep impression on me in my childhood.
The Passenger

“I used to be someone else, but I traded him in.” In Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy posits that although modern man understands the world around him better than ever, his failure to understand himself renders him desperate to escape himself. Percy cites modern fiction’s common use of amnesia as a plot device as […]
Werckmeister Harmonies

“Space travel makes you realize just how small we really are. When you see Earth as a tiny blue speck in the infinite reaches of space, you have to wonder about the mysteries of creation. Surely we’re all part of some great design, no more or less important than anything else in the universe. Surely […]
X-Men: First Class

G.K. Chesterton’s essay “Vengeance” suggests that although modern law is highly refined, it can evolve into a system devoid of any passion and become a machine which unreflectively punishes people. “The evil in our modern law is not one of barbaric passions, but one of passionless routine. The trouble is not that a lawyer really […]
American Graffiti

American Graffiti is arguably George Lucas’ masterpiece, not necessarily because it’s any more or less culturally significant or cinematically innovative than Star Wars, but simply because it’s Lucas’s most personal film. Here is a piece of his life, adapted into an ensemble piece that explores his own personal sense of nostalgia in a surprisingly bittersweet and grounded way.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

What makes a film, or anything for that matter, good? Perhaps I should answer that in a different way, since the word “good” in the English language has two broad but distinct definitions – the first moral, the second beneficial. Both of these are valuable as qualities in filmmaking, but what I mean to ask specifically is how do we, from our various frames of reference, discern value in a particular film?
The Lady from Shanghai

Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai begins with the sea, roiling and foaming beneath the opening credits. Many films noir are laden with existential anxieties; indeed, fatalism and cynicism are as commonplace in the genre as stylized lighting, bantering innuendoes, and convoluted crimes.
TRON: Legacy

TRON: Legacy can hardly be called a great film, but it made quite the impression on me when I first saw it on opening night back in December of 2010, and I have been making excuses for it ever since. Emerging from the theater, I might even, in my adolescent fervor, have described it as […]
John Wick: Chapter 2

Early in John Wick: Chapter 2, the titular assassin (Keanu Reeves) somberly places his weapons in a box, puts the box in a hole in his basement, and covers it with wet concrete. The action suggests an addict burying his stash, and symbolizes his intent to leave his world of violence and live a new […]
Snowden: Propaganda and the Mundane Beasts It Makes

Oliver Stone is one of the few directors whose auteurism is his ideology. While he has hit a few correct notes (mostly in the Adagio for Strings sequences of Platoon) there is very little about his directorial style—no signature montages or lengthy tracking shots—that say “Oliver Stone” the way that his completely misinformed takes on […]
A Gritty Goodness: The River Thief

The typical hero of a faith-based film measures their own satisfaction with the ending by the metric ton. If you stuck a teaspoon in the ending of the average Christian film, you’d pull it out dripping with enough sweet goo to give everyone in the world a mouthful of cavities. We don’t merely like redemption. […]