Released in 2019 and set in 1890s New England, Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse is a feverish parable of labor and obsession, taking as much from Greek mythology as it does from Marxist thought.
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Even the real sea is not the sea that we know—the sea that is Darwazah’s liberty, Varda’s heart, and Hopinka’s custodian. What has been given to us through the oceanic message is an inviolable museum of images, and that is why filmmakers—those makers, founders, and interrogators of images—will always come to seek its profundity, its point of contact between worlds.
The apotheosis of mutiny movies also happens to be the rip-roaring coolest of the bunch, a piece of pure pop entertainment that—much like its director, Tony Scott—is due for reconsideration.
Finding Nemo is a mood piece, an expression of fear, joy, adventure, and inner turmoil. And what better metaphor for the terrifying possibilities presented by the wider world than the heaving depths of the open ocean?
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Featured Essays
from the archives (2013 - 2023)
Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a fight for recognition and existence, but more importantly, it’s a story of love as an act of reanimation.
Honing in on “the zone” as a location, Glazer uses The Zone of Interest to explore how place is a container of memories, emotions, and time.
John Turturro’s film tells the story of a failing theater company trying to stage a new play while the lives of the actors and various theater people intersect, conflict, and finally resolve. I have seen it at least fifty times—maybe more. But only after my uncle’s funeral in 2021 did it occur to me that, yes, Illuminata might be an opera.
Each time I return to the "Everything Old is New Again" scene in All That Jazz, I’m wowed anew at the sheer fullness of it; how it can pack so much feeling and information into an ostensibly sweet little dance number.
I was expecting politics with which I disagreed in Civil War—but instead, I was met with a deep cynicism that hit too close to my own core.
The author of Miss May Does Not Exist opens up about writing a book on the famously elusive and brilliant Elaine May, falling down rabbit holes, and her own deep love for Ishtar.
