As far as movies go, 2022 was definitely one of the years of all time. We saw a few really remarkable Hollywood blockbusters amid a largely desolate crop of IP building, some intriguing independent outings, some old masters returning for a couple final laps (4 movies on this list directed…

Every decade starting in 1952 the British film magazine Sight & Sound runs a poll of critics and directors in an effort to name a broadly consensus list of the greatest films of all time. On December 1st, the eighth of these polls was released, setting a new boundary for…

One thing to make clear up front: I’ve become obssessed with Bob Dylan over the past year. I’ve listened to all of his studio albums in the order they were released, including the unauthorized 1973 collection of outtakes Columbia put out, dipped into some of the bootleg series and his…

To start with Touch of Evil, it is obvious and necessary to start with Orson Welles, and to understand the anxiety that surrounded his career that found its way into the film. A brilliant career in theatre and radio led to Welles at age 26 to direct Citizen Kane (1941)…

Spoilers ahead. The internet is an alien place, one whose customs and languages are borderline impenetrable to those who have not internalized them. As someone who was born on the border of the new millennium and has spent his whole life surrounded by video games, social media, television, and other…

The Hollywood studio system was the productive norm in American filmmaking for much of film history’s classical era, starting in the 1920’s and ending in the late-1960’s. The primary motivation for this mode of production was economic; the major studios of the time, many of which still exist today, maximized…

Around the time that Psycho was opening the borders of American genre filmmaking, a similarly seismic event was occurring in Italy. Mario Bava, the godfather of Italian horror and himself more than worthy of an article here, was establishing the giallo genre, a precursor to the slasher, characterized by its…

The most recent column I’ve written here was about Julia Ducournau’s 2021 film Titane, a film that has garnered a lot of hype and that I had high hopes for but ultimately found extremely lacking, both in style and subject. I included the term “fashionable transgression” in the column’s title…

Spoilers for Titane I use this space generally to write about movies I greatly enjoy or find intellectually stimulating in some way. That usually ends up manifesting in writing about genre films, often involving a recurring group of directors that I can’t get lodged out of my brain—Cronenberg, De Palma…