Recommending stories from Yasmin Tayag, Elliott Woods, David Ramsey, Larissa Diakiw, and A.S. Hamrah.
film criticism
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Total Breakdown of All the Easter Eggs
“Major film studios embracing AI, newspapers announcing the death of moviegoing, critics devoid of values: all of this can instill a great sense of defeat. We have to write against it.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
What I Saw at the Movies
“I wasn’t a film critic or festival programmer or even an aspiring director. I was just an adolescent schoolboy and, in my parents’ probably loving description, a ‘weirdo.’”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Elevate Me Later
“Highbrow horror cinema has won respectability—but sold its soul.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes
“The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked — and yet has Hollywood in its grip.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Back, Scoundrels: Eating the Rich on Film
“A century after ‘Battleship Potemkin,’ portraying class conflict on screen seems less black-and-white, and not just because we’ve invented color photography.”
Posted inFeature
How Wednesday Addams Birthed a Generation of Cynics
Nearly 30 years ago, Christina Ricci’s version of the character reinforced millennials’ suspicion that “the bright side” is an illusion.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Making of Silent Bruce
The tragic end to Bruce Willis’ career — aphasia that challenges his speaking and cognition — shouldn’t befall anyone. Yet, as Matt Zoller Seitz points out in an incisive reading of the actor’s oeuvre, Willis long ago chose a path that would eerily presage his eventual diagnosis. You could say Willis’s career was never the […]
Posted inUncategorized
Final Girl, Terrible Place
I was expecting a handy theory. What I found was a way of seeing that would help me decode a script I’d been stuck in for much of my life.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Il Maestro
Martin Scorsese on “content,” the films of Federico Fellini, and the art of cinema.