“I Think It’s Weird”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza

|Steven Rybin| 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a teenage actor and budding entrepreneur, lives with his mom Anita (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and younger brother Greg (Milo Herschlag) in the San Fernando Valley during the long summer of 1973. Whether it’s waterbeds or… Continue reading

The Architecture of Family: An Autumn Afternoon and The Royal Tenenbaums

|Andrew Neill| Let’s get a potentially uncool but nonetheless true thing about me out of the way right now: I am a huge fan of the American film director Wesley Wales Anderson. You probably know him as Wes Anderson. He’s one of my favorite directors—gotta be in the top three… Continue reading

TV Time

|Nate Logsdon| Wim Wenders couldn’t find reality anywhere. In the Spring of 1983, he had traveled to Tokyo to mark the 20th anniversary of Yasujirō Ozu’s death. He was seeking the Japanese world that appeared so luminously in the films of that great director, whose body of work… Continue reading

Don Hertzfeldt Has Something to, um, Tell You

|J.R Jones| Don Hertzfeldt’s characters have always struggled for words. In the opening scene of his hourlong animation It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), the everyman protagonist, Bill, recognizes someone walking toward him on the street and prepares a greeting. But when they pass… Continue reading

The Same Old Codes: Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975)

|Doug Carmoody| Cinema of Absence. Michaelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962) begins with a directorial confession. In preparation for a grim romantic argument, Vittoria (a young woman played by Monica Vitti) takes a moment to adjust her surroundings. She reaches through an empty picture frame… Continue reading