"A collaboration between the living Steven Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick seems appropriate to a project that reflects profoundly on the differences between life and non-life. Kubrick started this picture and came up with the idea that Spielberg should direct it, and after inheriting a 90-page treatment Kubrick had prepared..., Spielberg finished it in so much his own manner that it may be his most personal film, as well as his most thoughtful. It might make you cry; it's just as likely to give you the creeps—which is as it should be. This is a movie people will be arguing about for many years to come." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
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Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "The Danger of a Single Story." TED Global (2009) ["Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding."]
Bliuvaitė, Saulė. "Girls in Pictures." Notebook (July 25, 2025) ["The director of “Toxic” invites us into the scrapbook of influences for her film about the lives of teenage models."]
Hearing, David. "We're All Mad Here." Notes From the End of Cinema (August 10, 2025) ["The children in Weapons are unsettling for their agency – they’re not running away from but towards something. This brings another quote from Minima Moralia to mind, where Adorno talks about the effect of children growing up in a culture that has rescinded the social and economic promises it made to their parents: “Today we are faced with a generation purporting to be young yet in all its reactions insufferably more grown-up than its parents ever were.” Even someone as pessimistic as Adorno didn’t foresee the horror of regular school shootings, and the way in which a lottery-like acceptance of the death of a handful of children every year is considered by the government as an acceptable price to pay for the ownership of assault weapons. It is often remarked that this generation of children carry an existential weight not felt by any since those who served in the World Wars, with the exception that rather than a worldwide monoconflict, what exists instead is a series of overlapping crises that foreclose on the very concept of the future itself. This generation of children do not have a specific conflict to renounce as much as existing in a world amid the convergence of many. In this sense, the running children at the start of Weapons also hint at something paradoxical: that these children are both inexperienced and also existentially careworn in a way beyond those who parent them – they shouldn’t be in the street, but they’re already entangled in danger before they leave the house."]
O'Donoghue, "Raining in the Mountain." Senses of Cinema #113 (February 2025) ["Without proposing Raining in the Mountain as a crude allegory of contemporary geopolitics, one can still claim that the film reflects the world in which it was made. After decades of brutal stasis, the late 1970s saw flux, uncertainty, and possible liberalisation in the region, with the death of Mao and Deng Xiaoping’s introduction of radical social and economic reforms in China; Britain’s preparations for the eventual handover of Hong Kong; and civil rights protests that would eventually lead to democracy in Taiwan. Raining in the Mountain catches something of this social and political uncertainty. It presents a world of apparent impregnability and stability that comes under constant attack from within. The ruling classes are exposed as corrupt. If, however, we are under any illusion that Hu proposes the victorious ‘wise’ Buddhists as benevolent, look again at the dispiriting final scene."]
Polan, Dana. "Come Drink with Me." Senses of Cinema #113 (February 2025) ["As different as the discoveries of studio-fabricated nature and a shift in our understanding of a key character are (along with the un-realism of what that character is shown to be capable of), they both serve to take Come Drink with Me out of everyday reality and suggest how aware the film is of its qualities as cinematic construction. Critics sometimes treat the films of King Hu as having a spiritual or lyrical core (and titles like Xia Nu [A Touch of Zen, 1971] and Kongshan Ling Yu [Raining in the Mountain, 1979] can contribute to that), but it may well be the case that what the films are fundamentally “about” is the filmic experience itself – the narration of world-building and character development made manifest and serving as an intrinsic source of delight."]
Stone, Laurie. "Without Your Love." The Paris Review (August 18, 2025) [On Peter Bogdanovich's 1973 film Paper Moon: "I didn’t know we were in store for a work of art as tender as it is beautiful. It was made in the seventies, during a gallop of creativity in film, and set in the thirties. Watching it now, more than fifty years after it was made, the seventies feel as distant from us as the thirties felt to the makers of the film, and yet none of that is distancing, because great works of art, made specific by their time, are independent of their times. They are paradigms of the way pleasure and freedom, more than anything else, drive the making of art. When you are transported, it’s not back in history—it’s to the glass case holding the Grecian urn. ... Is there a perfect time of receptivity that allows you to enter a movie, or thoughts about the world, or feedback about your life? Does a work of art—or new information—enter you because it mixes with thoughts that have already been laid out, like ingredients for a meal you hadn’t planned to cook? Do I wish receptivity was more available? Maybe. And maybe it feels so good because it interrupts the other parts of life. What are “the other parts of life”? The parts where you are anywhere but in the moment.']
Subissati, Andrea and Alexandra West. "Pump It Up: The Substance (2024) Live from Salem Horror Fest." The Faculty of Horror (May 21, 2025) ["Join Andrea and Alex live from Salem Horror Fest for feats of strength (!) and a discussion of the horrors of beauty standards, the weight of celebrity culture, and the algorithms that are out to get us."]
Verstraten, Peter. "'I Will Be Your Preacher Teacher': Babygirl." Senses of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["In interviews Reijn has repeatedly mentioned that Babygirl was inspired by erotic thrillers from the 1980s and early 1990s. Her third feature film is a thorough exploration of the “dark thoughts” of protagonist Romy Mathis (Kidman), and in this article I will delve into the nature of her obscure desires. To a certain extent, Babygirl – the most debated film this year in the Netherlands – is a present-day successor to the so-called woman’s films from the 1940s; but, rather than expressing a “desire to desire”, the more emancipatory Babygirl comes closer to Slavoj Žižek’s call to “enjoy your symptom!”"]
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"It will be impossible to ever look at Gone with the Wind the same way after 12 Years a Slave, a brutally powerful and emotionally devastating film that takes great pains to rip any lingering vestiges of romanticism from America’s most shameful institution. You might be able to shrug off even the lurid depiction of slavery in Django Unchained to some extent as a cartoonish Tarantino fantasy. But 12 Years does not flinch from showing the most horrifyingly graphic details of Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) struggle to survive in a hellish pre-Civil War Louisiana, which he documented in a remarkable memoir… Well-meaning films like Lincoln and Lee Daniels’ The Butler merely scratch the surface compared to the deep and painful truths laid bare by 12 Years a Slave. It’s about time, Scarlett O’Hara." - Lou Lumenick, New York Post
There are many works of art about making works of art, but few as absorbing and emotionally arresting as Josephine Decker’s masterwork. All of Decker’s films deserve to be more widely seen, but there’s a singular magic to Madeline’s Madeline. It was the film, and the year, that Helena Howard should have been cemented as a superstar. As the eponymous teenager, Howard is volatile and fragile; split between her complex relationship with her mother Regina (Miranda July, breathtaking) and her deceptively exploitative yet affectionate relationship with the director of her experimental theater troupe, Evangeline (a tender Molly Parker). Decker has such a gift for haptic, expressionistic filmmaking that demands your active attention and emotion. It’s wildly original and innovative in its technical framework, but never distances the audience—the familiar growing pains of the coming-of-age genre hit hard. A vital, affecting piece of cinema to add into your favorites at haste. - Ella Kemp
"In 25TH HOUR Spike Lee takes the story of a convicted drug dealer's last day of freedom and expands it into a meditation on New York and America in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001… From the opening credits sequence, showing two beams of blue light where the World Trade Center once stood, to the closing moments, which evoke the dream of the wide-open road, Lee takes the spiritual moment and crystallizes it into art. The result is a film of sadness and power, the first great 21st century movie about a 21st century subject… With a slice-of-life film such as 25TH HOUR, there's always the challenge of how to end it. Lee and screenwriter David Benioff bring the film to a place of poetry, with a fantasy of America and open spaces that's slightly funny and mostly stirring and still very much about New York." - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
"How lucky are we that the 21st century has allowed us to witness the fresh and unique filmmaking talent of RaMell Ross? While most recently he’s gotten the deserved recognition for 2024’s Nickel Boys, my pick for our list is his stunning 2018 directorial debut Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Ross’s documentary depicts slice-of-life moments of a Black community in Hale County, Alabama, framed only by intertitles asking “What is the orbit of our dreaming?” or “Whose child is this?” He simply lets his subjects be in their own moments while his experimental kino-eye challenges the documentary genre. It might just be the most profoundly human documentary I’ve personally seen, and I encourage more Letterboxd members to check it out, enter the community of Hale County as a spectator and ruminate on the visual treat Ross has given us." - Shae
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"The story of two college girls negotiating the treacherous currents of a drab police state to secure an illegal abortion, 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS is a movie one watches in a state of mounting dread. Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's brilliantly discomfiting second feature is one long premonition of disaster. Set in 1987, 4 MONTHS moves from the shabby clutter of an overcrowded college dorm, through the dimly lit streets of a provincial city, to a rundown Stalinoid deco hotel… For all its long behavioral takes, 4 MONTHS is remarkably unshowy. The movie is as drained of color as the girls' faces. Daily life is a hellish adventure." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
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