Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers presents the discomfiting encounter with another —someone like you—and yet entirely unlike you, mysterious to you, unknown and unknowable.
There's a song performed in James Whale's musical, Show Boat, wherein race is revealed as a set of variegated and contradictory performances, signals to others, a manner of being seen and a manner of remaining hidden, and it isn't "Old Man River".
In Scorsese's hands, the voice-over is less a substitute for what we are not shown but instead becomes a vital thread woven into the fabric of the film's meaning.
Pier Paolo Pasolini's classic drama, Teorema, grapples with the parable -- the manner of knowing that which always remains just beyond our grasp.
Bruce Lee's fight scenes evoke Gestalt theory: actual perception is a response to a provocation. Consider this philosophy while watching the films in Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits and you too can become the water.
In a strange kind of way, Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know is about two competing notions of "forever" in relation to love.
While philosopher Stanley Cavell endeavors to show that we must mean what we say, Godard’s Bruno Forestier of Le Petit Soldat suggests that we simply cannot and must not mean what we say.
While all films project a world that might be, certain films and certain filmmakers, like Karel Zeman, come closer than others in bringing to the surface the underlying phantasmagoric essence of cinema.
There are mythical moments in Almodóvar’s All About My Mother. We are meant to register repetition in the story as something wonderfully strange, a connection across the chasm of impossibility.
In one sense, life in the time of Coronavirus clarifies an essential element of love: love always occurs at an ontological distance.
The movements of the camera in Melville's Un flic attempt to overcome one of the most inscrutable divides in existence.
Based on William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, The Story of Temple Drake grapples with the unbidden, unsettling force of emergent sexuality.
