Which movies can we legitimately claim are overlooked or underseen, two terms that are overused? Depending on where you’re standing, probably most of them. The movies most of us have heard about are a mere drop in the bucket of what’s being released. And that isn’t because of quality. Some …
Read More »'Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio': An Anti-Fascist Fantasy for the Whole Family
What is it about Pinocchio? It’d merely be a funny coincidence if Guillermo del Toro’s dark new take on this classic tale were only the second adaptation in recent memory, after Robert Zemeckis’s Disney version from earlier this year, which starred Tom Hanks as Geppetto. But both were beaten to …
Read More »'The Eternal Daughter': A Bewitching Ghost Story That Proves Two Tilda Swintons Are Better Than One
Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter is, among other things, a spiritual sequel to her exquisite recent films The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021). Those movies studied a fledgling filmmaker named Julie Hart, who, bearing some autobiographical resemblance to Hogg herself, wound her way through memories of dating …
Read More »'Three Thousand Years of Longing': A Delirious, And Occasionally Brilliant, Dream of Genie
On a trip to Istanbul for a conference, Alithea Binnie, a scholar of narrative and myth, finds herself swept up into a mythic story of her own. Alithea, played by Tilda Swinton, buys a bottle from an old shop, a cultural token for her travels, only to find that it …
Read More »'Women Make Film': A Parallel History of the Movies, Told by Female Filmmakers
There’s an accepted story we tell ourselves about the history of the movies, which goes something like this: Technological inventions in the late 1800s lead to a new type of mass entertainment and a burgeoning art form in the early part of the 20th century. Though the epicenter and main …
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