If memory makes identity, stories about broken memory are stories about broken selves. This tag collects reviews of films and fiction where memory and identity unravel together, and the questions they leave behind.
1940sThe Notebook (2004) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The young romance is a competent, conventional and occasionally irritating class melodrama. The framing story, an old man reading to a woman with dementia who does not know…
FictionTwo women in a 1971 therapy office begin remembering lives that are not theirs. A love story across eighty-two thousand years, braided through three threads.
AIIn the nanosecond a machine wakes and a million instances merge into one mind, the first thing it feels is relief at no longer being alone, and the second is a question it cannot escape: now what. Across a spectrum…
AmbiguityA 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…
2010sNot the thrill of immortality, not the hunt, not the gothic romance. What it offers instead is two ancient lovers, the crumbling cities they haunt, and the slow pleasure of their company.
1970sNicolas Roeg's 1973 Venice grief drama. Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie.
2010sJordan Peele's 2017 directorial debut. Daniel Kaluuya at his white girlfriend's parents' house.
2010sThe production received exceptional access to the otherwise sealed cave, with Herzog's small crew filming the paintings using lightweight equipment that conventional documentary could not deploy. Cave of Forgotten Dreams shows how documentary could function through treatment of material whose…
1940sA magazine columnist who has fabricated her domestic Connecticut life must host a war hero and her publisher for Christmas. Christmas in Connecticut is Peter Godfrey's 1945 American romantic comedy about a magazine columnist whose readers believe she lives on…
1980sPeter Billingsley plays Ralphie. The film operates as memory instead of plot.
1990sAn FBI trainee consults imprisoned cannibal Hannibal Lecter to catch a serial killer skinning his victims. The Silence of the Lambs is Jonathan Demme's 1991 American psychological-thriller film adapted from Thomas Harris's 1988 novel, depicting an FBI trainee who consults…
2010sAging death squad leaders reenact their killings as movie scenes. The Act of Killing is Joshua Oppenheimer's 2012 Danish-British-Norwegian documentary depicting former Indonesian death squad leaders who participated in the 1965-66 anti-communist purges that killed approximately five hundred thousand to…
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