First Cow opens with a huge, rusty barge floating down the Columbia River at a glacial pace. Between the vessel’s entrance from the left of the screen and eventual exit to the right, the audience settles into the slowness of First Cow, becoming absorbed into its hypnotizing, soothing atmosphere. At the same time, the scene…
Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) needs a fresh start. When we are reintroduced to the Suicide Squad antiheroine, she has just been dumped by her “puddin,” the Joker. Cocktail-drunk and heartbroken, she hijacks a truck and drives it straight into the industrial plant where, in a vat of unnamed chemicals, ‘Harley Quinn’—not Dr. Harleen Quinzel, Ph.D.,…
Best Picture by Abby Webster Who Will Win: 1917 Who Should Win: Parasite For a brief moment in 2017, we lived in a world where the Academy made good decisions. Last year’s Gr**n B**k Best Picture win, and this year’s tremendously bad hot take from an anonymous Academy voter that foreign films should only be nominated in their…
(CW: brief mentions of sexual assault) Relentlessly boring, season 10 of Shameless—a sometimes dark, sometimes absurd dramedy about a family from Chicago’s South Side—set a new low for the long-running and ever-declining series. For me, a (former? Present? Recovering?) Shameless fan, the success of the show has always hinged on two things: a delicate yet…
Abby: Carol (2015) What makes a Christmas movie? Carol has everything the classics do—romance, snowy New York City streets, a capitalism-themed inciting incident—with an added lesbian period drama twist. Draped in an exquisite fur, Carol (Cate Blanchett) catches the eye of shop-girl Therese (Rooney Mara), adorned in a work-issued Santa hat, from across the sales…
Cinema is musical. When well-wielded, the language of film—rhythmic and lyrical—demands to be heard as well as seen. In the first moments of Waves (2019), a camera spins within the sacred enclosure of Tyler’s (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) car, his girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie) extending her arms out the window. In the diegetic background, an Animal…
The year is 2007: between Lindsey Lohan’s 84-minute stint in a California jail and Britney Spears’ yearlong breakdown of shaved heads and smashed umbrellas, media sympathies for female celebrities and their mental health are at an all-time low. On late-night talk shows, punchlines abound. It seems almost fated that, during this year, a national news…
Bathed in the orange planetary glow of a Martian recording booth, astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) goes off-script. Roy, far from home on the Red Planet colony, is being used by superiors from Earth’s military space command to lure his father, Dr. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), out of hiding. Sixteen years prior, on a…
In a rustic West Village workshop, two ostensibly twin claw-foot chairs are set in front of a young Theodore Decker (Oakes Fegley): one an authentic piece of period furniture, the other a reproduction of the antique. The difference between them is tactile—as Theo runs his fingertips over the dark mahogany grain, he finds the reproduction…