After Life: On Roger Corman and Frankenstein Unbound
The urge after life—from art and business alike—is the creation of memorial. Memorial for Corman feels impossible, if only for the breadth.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
The urge after life—from art and business alike—is the creation of memorial. Memorial for Corman feels impossible, if only for the breadth.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
For all its strangeness and inexplicability, Billy Jack is very real, and its confusion and missteps make it more than a snapshot of its era—it’s a self-portrait of a country during a strange time.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Something Wild restlessly stitches together a pattern that is wholly unique, something totally its own: costume designer Norma Moriceau's ceaselessly rainbowed designs, the unflinching rawness of Tak Fujimoto’s photography, a score by The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, the David Byrne frills, the American sensuality and vulgarity, the stylistic gearshifts from wicked comedy to wickedly violent darkness, and most of all a natural-born rebel’s deep empathy for—and extreme close-up on...| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Something Wild restlessly stitches together a pattern that is wholly unique, something totally its own: costume designer Norma Moriceau's ceaselessly rainbowed designs, the unflinching rawness of Tak Fujimoto’s photography, a score by The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, the David Byrne frills, the American sensuality and vulgarity, the stylistic gearshifts from wicked comedy to wickedly violent darkness, and most of all a natural-born rebel’s deep empathy for—and extreme close-up on...| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Like the films that inspired it, Fighting Mad has plenty of moral high ground to spare, but Demme imbues his opus of “redneck revenge” with a potent ecological message.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Between the four lines that form a televisual frame, Jonathan Demme’s Who Am I This Time? is among the most romantic gestures ever set to film.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
In Jonathan Demme’s 2004 adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, the truth is a nightmare.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Consider how The Silence of the Lambs revolves around vision. Not only perception, but empathy and hindsight, and the non-empirical prick of intuition.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Jonathan Demme’s 'Something Wild' is a lot of things—Renoirian screwball, Gen-X Odd Couple, defense for the reggae mixtape—but it’s a road movie first.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Melvin and Howard would be a curiosity in Jonathan Demme’s filmography if not for the fact that his entire filmography is a collection of curiosities.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Gummo is gross and soft-hearted and then cruel at every turn. We’re handed a grab bag of what Korine dares us to call perversions.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
This month, for a taste of summertime sadness, we're looking at Mike Mills’ semi-autobiographical bleak comedy, Beginners (2010).| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Coming from a Place: Community in the Films of Hayao Miyazaki| Bright Wall/Dark Room
One could be forgiven for assuming the Nitrate Picture Show proffers sanctuary from the uncertainty reigning outside, but this year’s edition inverted this presumed mandate, with a program of films that presented the past not as a refuge from our present tumult, but as a reflection of it.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
So much of Rachel Getting Married is about these needle-fine moments of grace and clemency. Many great directors find truth in skepticism, but Jonathan Demme often found it in the sparseness of in-betweens. He knew the great promise of rehearsals: for wedding dinners and musical performances and people trying on new ways to heal, in perpetuity until it sticks, because there’s humanity in the effort.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
The Talking Heads are strange truth-tellers, joyfully angry people, persistently interested in the power of art. And in Stop Making Sense, collaborating with Jonathan Demme elevates their music into something truly transcendent.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Most things, in and of themselves, can be turned into suitable metaphors for life because they’re inextricable from lived experience. Any concrete object can be a metaphor. But nothing captures the ebb and flow of the rhythms of life itself quite like baseball does, with its slow ebbs and swift surges, a sport of opposing forces thrown together into harmony| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: film critic Bilge Ebiri—the man, the myth, the legend—joins us to bookend our discussion of all things Mission: Impossible from a couple of summers ago, on the occasion of the final film (?) of a nearly 30 year franchise.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Community isn’t just for comfort in Miyazaki’s world—it serves an important function as a hallmark of interdependence, a vital theme in most of his films. Miyazaki is deeply concerned with how humans, animals, spirits, and the natural world can live in balance with one another, or at least strive to.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
What I see in Wim Wenders' Perfect Days is a man healing himself through intentionality, allowing himself to be in the world and one with it.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
True/False Film Festival feels special because it’s so intimate, populated by cinephiles who love the underestimated and misunderstood genre of documentary features.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
'Drive My Car' is a thoughtful meditation on the power of art—how it changes us, how it hurts us, and perhaps how it can heal us.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
After a run of crummy films about “age gap relationships," what a relief it is to see Between the Temples, a film whose maybe-lovers seem to be overwhelmed by their affection for one another.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
The Banshees of Inisherin broke my heart, but made me laugh so much that I’d missed the heartbreak occurring; I’d enjoyed it too much to spot the knives gleaming beneath its surface.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
This month on the show, Carrie Courogen joins us to discuss The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Elaine May's honeymoon horror film.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
For Richard Linklater, Hit Man is a genre exercise, or really, an exercise in the idea of genre.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
I spent much of Furiosa wondering why this film existed—less “who is this for?” and more “why is this here?” The answer that eventually emerged was that of character, not of plot—it exists to show us how a drive for revenge can turn into a drive for redemption.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Thank god for the New York Film Festival, where every year I buckle under the pressure of a glut of art and groan to anyone who will listen: “I didn’t see enough!”| Bright Wall/Dark Room
