October 2025 - Bright Wall/Dark Room
A Labor of Attention| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Lady Bird is the closing film of our class, presented to my students as a look back at senior year through a film that gets a lot right about the high school experience. I invite them to watch from a vantage point closer to the events of the film than they will ever be again.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
In their own ways, these four films—The Children's Hour, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Teachers' Lounge, and Monster—demonstrate how the classroom is held stringently within the social constraints of its time. In school, for the first time, parents are unable to control everything, and this anxiety of corruption is placed squarely on the shoulders of the teacher.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
In their (hi)stories of successful losers as well as all the winners who fail perfectly, Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein find our most human shapes: pleasure in each others’ company, the sublime tension of failing again better, and something like love by a different name.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
In Lucas' Star Wars saga, it’s not the teacher’s wisdom, but his failure, that drives the protagonist to his destiny.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Having the privilege of being a local and living a short commute away from Festival Street, year after year, I’m able to focus on what makes TIFF most special for me: its varied Canadian programming.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
This month on the pod, special guest Adam Nayman—Toronto-based critic, lecturer, and author of David Fincher: Mind Games—joins us to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Seven.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
One could fairly criticize Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman)—“player-coach” of the Charlestown Chiefs in George Roy Hill's chaotically raunchy Slap Shot—for a wide variety of character flaws and professional failings, but he is true to the letter of St. Francis de Sales’ wisdom: Be who you are and be that well.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
So much of what Keating does in Dead Poets Society has to do with shifting one’s perspective. Stand on the desk and say what you can see.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Whatever Bo Burnham’s 'Inside' is—a stand-up routine, a television special, a piece of musical theater, a music album, a documentary, a cinematic selfie, a confession—I think it’s cinema.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Why is it so hard to bring Latin stories to screen? One answer is offered by Stand and Deliver itself, when Escalante tells his students they already have two strikes against them. He doesn’t say what exactly those strikes are, because for them it’s simply understood: they’re brown, and they’re poor.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Both Road House (1989) and Magic Mike (2012) are about learning how to be a person in society. It’s possible to pick some of it up in passing, but it’s much easier to learn when there’s a teacher involved.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
Hello, champagne. This month we welcome back Michael Koresky, the author of "Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness," to discuss Alfred Hitchcock's Rope.| 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
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
So much of Jonathan Demme's 2008 film Rachel Getting Married is about needle-fine moments of grace and clemency.| Bright Wall/Dark Room
The Talking Heads are strange truth-tellers, joyfully angry people, persistently interested in the power of art. And collaborating with Jonathan Demme elevated their music to something truly transcendent.| 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
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
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
