Brokeback Mountain (2005) Review
Brokeback Mountain (2005) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two men herd sheep on a Wyoming mountain in 1963 and spend the next twenty years failing to have a life. Ang Lee won Best Director and the…
Tag: Loneliness
Loneliness may be the most universal subject fiction has: everyone recognizes it, and few things are harder to render honestly. This tag collects reviews and essays on stories about isolation and the ache of disconnection.
1990sLeaving Las Vegas (1995) Review
Leaving Las Vegas (1995) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man goes to Las Vegas to drink himself to death and states the plan in the first twenty minutes. Mike Figgis shot it for around four…
2020sNomadland (2020) Review
Nomadland (2020) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Frances McDormand lives in a van among real people playing themselves, and the film is at its best whenever she is listening. What it will not do is name…
1970sKings of the Road (1976) Review
Kings of the Road (1976) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two men drive a repair truck along the East German border servicing dying cinemas, for a hundred and seventy-five minutes, with almost no plot. It was…
FictionThe Cold Thing
Edvard has loved Marisol for four months, and tells himself the love is the larger part of him. In the gray hour before dawn he does the arithmetic one last time and finds the truth he buried under the romance:…
AmbiguityOpen the Line
A late-night Pittsburgh radio host has built an eleven-year career interviewing the dead on air, while everyone argues over whether he's a fraud. It's real, and one night the line opens for the one voice he's spent his whole career…
1970sMartin (1977)
Martin earns its 8 by asking a question that quietly dismantles the entire vampire genre. What if there is no such thing as a vampire, only a disturbed young man who believes he is one?
2010sLet Me In (2010)
Matt Reeves remakes Let the Right One In with care and conviction. Let Me In earns its 8 by being the rarest of things, an American remake of a beloved foreign film that justifies its own existence.
2010sThe Transfiguration (2016)
Michael O'Shea's grounded debut uses vampirism as a lens for trauma and isolation. The film never says, and the ambiguity is the point.
1940sThe Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Two Budapest shop employees who can't stand each other are unknowingly falling in love through anonymous correspondence. The Shop Around the Corner is Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 American romantic comedy adapted from Miklós László's Hungarian play Parfumerie, depicting two Budapest leather-goods…
1960sThe Apartment (1960)
An ambitious insurance clerk lends his apartment to executives for their affairs, until he falls for the boss's mistress at Christmas. The Apartment is Billy Wilder's 1960 American comedy-drama about an ambitious insurance company clerk who lends his Manhattan apartment…
1960sHow the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)
Chuck Jones directs the animated Dr. Seuss special about a sour creature plotting to steal Christmas from the Whos in Whoville. How the Grinch Stole Christmas!