Tafoya, Scout. "Post-Punk Cinema." (Film list on Letterboxd: January 2025)
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"Cameron Crowe's loose, affectionate look back on his earlier career as a teenage rock journalist overflows with wonderful performances and memorable moments. Patrick Fugit brings the perfect balance of intelligence and innocence to the role of William Miller, a San Diego teenager who takes to the road with a scruffy band called Stillwater, on assignment for Rolling Stone. ALMOST FAMOUS isn't perfect -- it lacks a necessary dimension of demonic sleaze -- but Mr. Crowe's smart, compassionate writing and performances by Billy Crudup, Kate Hudson, Jason Lee and Frances McDormand (among many others) make it hum." - A.O. Scott, The New York Times
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Close your eyes and think about the cult leaders you’ve seen portrayed in movies—the David Koresh stand-ins with long hair, spewing pseudo-intellectual musings with their questionable charisma. Then think of the challenge Philip Seymour Hoffman had in The Master—how he had to be radiantly respectable on the surface, rotten to the core beneath, presenting a veneer that masked deep-seated insidiousness. Truth is, we could’ve gone with any number of PSH’s performances in the 21st century—it greatly pains us to leave his work in Doubt, Capote, Charlie Wilson’s War, Along Came Polly, and especially Synecdoche, New York on the cutting-room floor—but it ultimately felt right to go with the role that captured him at his loudest and quietest, his most charming and most villainous. The processing interrogation in the bowels of the boat—where Hoffman’s L. Ron Hubbard avatar, Lancaster Dodd, and Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell volley back and forth—is on the short list for best-acted scenes of the century, but there are plenty of indelible moments to choose from: the hand job, the unexpected motorcycle send-off, the volcanic detonation of “pig fuck.” The Master is also PSH’s final major work outside of the Hunger Games franchise, which conjures a heartbreaking question: If he had lived past the age of 46, would he have had another role that surpassed this? —Sayles
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Hudson, David. "Guillermo del Toro and Frankenstein." Current (September 4, 2025) ["Whether or not Frankenstein will ultimately be deemed to be “del Toro’s finest work, it is the purest, most sincere distillation of all his dreams and nightmares, turned into two and a half hours of exhilarating passion for old school filmmaking,” writes Max Borg at the Film Verdict. Del Toro argues that it is “extremely important for me to keep the reality of film craft alive. I want real sets. I don’t want digital. I don’t want AI. I don’t want simulation. I want old-fashioned craftsmanship. I want people painting, building, hammering, plastering. I go in and paint props myself. I supervise the construction of the sets. There is an operatic beauty when you build everything by hand.”"]
Mughal, Alisha. "It Can't Rain All the Time: The Crow." New Books in Film (August 13, 2025) ["Alisha Mughal's It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow (ECW Press, 2025) weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural resonance. A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinity Released in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.” In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn’t need to be hard and impenetrable. Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Mughal brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope."]
Reijin, Helina. "Ari Aster and Halina Reijn Think This Interview Might Start a Cult." Interview (July 30, 2025) ["Famously, the director Ari Aster isn’t so comfortable with the conventions of modern-day movie promotion. Press junkets, magazine profiles, cutesy interviews with teenage TikTok stars—Aster would rather be on a movie set. But last week, when he got on a Zoom call with fellow filmmaker Halina Reijn, he wasn’t a tortured genius, as he’s so often characterized, but simply a man talking to his friend about the vagaries of writing and directing. “In the beginning, I find it almost impossible to deal with a blank page,” said Aster, whose fourth feature, Eddington, an unhinged neo-Western set in the dark days of COVID lockdown, landed in theaters earlier this month. On set, however, “something in me kicks into gear and I’m not thinking,” he says. Autopilot, it seems, has served Aster well. Since his explosive 2018 debut with Hereditary, the 39-year-old director has gone onto to make a series of progressively twisted and uncompromising films, including Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid. “I’m always shocked that I’ve been given the opportunity again,” he told Reijn, who made her own foray into directing with last year’s psychosexual thriller Babygirl. Below, the two filmmakers get together for a wide-ranging conversation about power, genius, cults, and spirituality."]
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