How the Orientalist Vices of Licorice Pizza Overpower its Virtues

|Anjali Moore| Since I have always held a compulsive devotion to 1970s media and coming-of-age films, I ventured to the cinema to see Licorice Pizza with relatively high hopes when it was first released in 2021. I felt like Licorice Pizza might pierce my general disaffection for PTA… Continue reading

A New Vision of the Western: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood

|Dan McCabe| For better or worse, the Western is the quintessential American myth from its beginnings with The Great Train Robbery (1903) through the films of John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. During the Western’s heyday in the first half of the 1900s, the nineteenth… Continue reading

Oneiric Reflections and Rebirth of Femininity in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) & At Land (1944)

|Olivia Fredrickson| The cinema of Maya Deren without a doubt captures not only the intrinsic reflections of her consistently shifting identity as a woman and artist, but also the labyrinthic inner workings of the self and psyche. Both of these crucial elements of her cinema and identity… Continue reading

Aim the Drill at the Ground and Turn It On: Ben Affleck, Armageddon, and the Golden Age of the DVD Commentary

|Andy Strudevant| The depth of annoyance that a lot of movie people felt about this subject is a little harder to parse from a quarter-century later, because I think movie people are supposed to be a little bit more broad-minded and populist these days. But man, it’s worth remembering… Continue reading

He Knows When You’re Awake: (Re)Visiting the History of Santas in Horror

|Finn Odum| Eons ago (in 2019), when I was but a spritely, youthful child (20 and in college), I wrote about the 1984 controversial Claus classic Silent Night, Deadly Night. Back in the days of zinger conclusions and quippy comments on Santa Claus’s sanctity, I had dreams… Continue reading

How To Properly Identify the Ending of On Dangerous Ground

|MH Rowe| On Dangerous Ground (1951) might appear at first to be one of the more unbearably melodramatic film noirs ever produced. Its ending, or really the ending of the ending—the film’s final scene—threatens especially to pull all that has preceded it down into the depths of pure… Continue reading

Ozu’s Colorful Everyday: Equinox Flower (1958) and Late Autumn (1960)

|Steve Rybin| The Trylon’s “Ozu in Color” series presents four of Yasujirō Ozu’s color films made near the end of the director’s career (1958 to 1963). These films cover what is for Ozu familiar narrative ground: fathers and mothers give away daughters to marriage; generational conflicts pit… Continue reading

A Certain Slant of Light: The Thin Line Between Fantasy and Reality in Soleil Ô

|Courtney Kowalke| The first movie I saw at Trylon in the spring of 2019 was John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet (1984). The film follows a protagonist known only as “The Brother” (Joe Morton), an extraterrestrial who crash-lands in Harlem, New York City… Continue reading

Paying Attention to Man Ray: Some Reflections on What Experimental Cinema Can Do For Us Right Now

|Sophie Durbin| As a child, it would’ve been hard to fathom that going to the movies would one day be as esoteric as spending a night at the opera. But some time in the past five years, I realized that spending much of my free time on film had suddenly cast me as an eccentric clinger-on to… Continue reading