Stories
I Used to Float, Now I Just Fall Down
The Musical Nostalgia and Feminine Fantasy of Greta Gerwig's Barbie
Tenet (2020): Beside You in Time Bright Wall/Dark Room
The People We Used to Be: On 'Sneakers' and Being Young & Dumb Bright Wall/Dark Room
Point Blank (1967): That Night At Alcatraz Bright Wall/Dark Room
My Money Is Still In Your Pocket: On Michael Mann’s 'Thief' (1981) Bright Wall/Dark Room
Postcards from Gialloville: The Bird With The Crystal Plumage Bright Wall/Dark Room
See You Next Year: Monsieur Hulot's Holiday Bright Wall/Dark Room
Asteroid City (2023): To the Stars Bright Wall/Dark Room
Lists
Bright Wall/Dark Room, Issue 44: True Stories 10 films
Every film covered in our forty-fourth issue, True Stories, first published in February 2017.
Bright Wall/Dark Room, Issue 43: Best of 2016 8 films
Every film covered in our forty-third issue, Best of 2016, first published in January 2017.
Bright Wall/Dark Room, Issue 42: Holidays 8 films
Every film covered in our forty-second issue, Holidays, first published in December 2016.
Bright Wall/Dark Room, Issue 41: Margaret 1 film
Every film covered in our forty-first issue, Margaret, first published in November 2016.
Bright Wall/Dark Room, Issue 40: Faith 13 films
All the films (and limited series) covered in our fortieth issue, Faith, first published in October 2016.
Bright Wall/Dark Room, Issue 39: Friends and Enemies 8 films
All the films covered in our thirty-ninth issue, Friends and Enemies, first published in September 2016.
Recent reviews
On some level, though, all of these movie portrayals blend together into a sort-of singular cinematic imagining of his persona and his psyche. Nixon was a man with a mind that never seemed to stop churning out thoughts and ideas, even while being unable to truly grasp reality. He was a man obsessed with status and power, so much so that he would stop at almost nothing to achieve it. He was a man who effortlessly shifted the blame for…
You get inured to this violence, living in the South. You take the violence because it’s part and parcel of the beauty. There’s a famous piece of pop art in my hometown: a purple armadillo named Felton, looming fifty feet long on a billboard by the highway. The joke is that you see a lot of armadillos by the highway, but those ones are usually eviscerated and surrounded by flies. It’s a reminder of the violence that awaits as you plunge into the sun-dappled and fragrant piney woods of East Texas.
-- Rosie Jonker, What You’re Fixin’ To See Is A True Story
All of this is why, on the first date with my trans girlfriend, I committed one of the less obvious micro-aggressions people do to trans people: I told her she was brave. The films about trans people that I’d watched had confused me, to the point that I not only felt that I understood her struggle, but I’d also conflated being transgender with living in a hostile world, with danger itself. This was the strongest—and more persistent—message I got from…
It’s not hard to conceive of a world which lacks empathy, in which words and truth don’t match up. It’s been predicted in literature for decades, and one need only turn on the news to hear the powerful speak in terms of “alternative facts” in this “post-truth” world. A world where the slaughter of children is met with empty condolences, devoid of any meaningful action. As the homeless man finishes speaking, he leaves the frame and asks a passerby for…
“You know I can’t let you make this movie,” she told producer Ed Saxon. “It’s gonna ruin my career. If you really insist on making this film, you’re going to have to change my name.” That, given the nature of the script, wasn’t a possibility. Adaptation, as Orlean eventually came to see, hinged on the conceit that every person we meet in the film is a real person. And so, while the notion that people would be confused as to…
There are two voices conspicuously absent from Stories We Tell. One is that of Diane Polley, the central character in the story, her absence explained by the fact that she is dead and no longer has the capacity to speak for herself, to explain or deflect or apologize for her actions and all the chaos that resulted. The other, more curiously, is that of Sarah Polley, who appears only in bits and pieces in the film. She conducted all the…
Music taught me how to love movies. It taught me to see movies as kaleidoscopic, a single image unfolding into two, into three; moving elements interlocking, adding up to more than the sum of their parts. Just as a single image can stay with you long after a film has ended, a song can invoke a feeling and get under your skin, whether it be the latest Top 40 hit or (of course) Mozart; people use music to shift their…
The main problem is that what biopics profess to give us—unfettered, personal access to a well-known individual—is complicated in Armstrong’s case by the fact that he is simultaneously a ubiquitous public figure and a notorious liar. This should be a bonus for the narrative film. It has no obligation to recreate real life so much as to represent it: there is no need for any moment to be true in a documentary sense of the word, so long as it…