Blue Valentine, Revolutionary Road, and Love’s Hard Questions
Blue Valentine and Revolutionary Road strip love of its dreamy colors, asking the Sartrean question of whether we can love without losing ourselves.
Film Analysis
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and the Limits of Identity
An essay on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, tracing how its dream logic and blue key reshape questions of identity, ambition, and self-perception.
Spielberg’s Disclosure Day Isn’t Really About Aliens
Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day looks like a film about aliens, but it's really a mirror for human fear, control, and our fraught…
The Philosophers Hiding Inside Our Dystopian Films
Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Foucault never watched The Matrix or The Hunger Games, but their ideas about power still explain what happens on…
Four Machines, Four Ways of Learning to Feel
Samantha, David, Ava, and Roy Batty each answer the same question differently: what happens the moment a machine starts to feel something…
Sentimental Value and the House That Wouldn’t Let Go
Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value turns an old house in Oslo into a character in its own right, unearthing a family's unspoken grief…
Her, Mr. Robot, and the Loneliness Screens Can’t Fix
Theodore falls for a voice on his phone. Elliot disappears into code. Her and Mr. Robot both explore loneliness in a hyper-connected…
Poor Things, Frankenstein, and the Right to Discover
Bella Baxter and Frankenstein's creature both discover the world with no instructions. What their parallel journeys say about consciousness and creation.
A Beautiful Mind: Living Inside a Code You Can’t Escape
Revisiting A Beautiful Mind's portrait of John Nash's schizophrenia, and how his wife Alicia became the one fixed point in an unraveling…