Stalled Beat: Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden

Midway through Mia Hansen-Løve’s sprawling, electronic dance music–themed Eden, French DJ Paul (the perpetually doe-eyed Félix de Givry) meets a Chicago DJ with whom he has been corresponding. “Man, you look young,” the man states bluntly. “Yeah, I get that a lot,” Paul bashfully replies. The exchange feels like a playful nod on Hansen-Løve’s part, […]

“Later On Down the Road”: The Anachronistic Geography of Thelma & Louise

Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise is often read as a feminist version of the road movie: a gender-swapped response to that ever-beloved genre in which man finds himself on the open road. Yet the film is more than the story of two women adopting masculine roles: Thelma (Geena Davis), Louise (Susan Sarandon), and their 1966 […]

The Analog Mother: Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion

The cabin is well worn, but one gets the feeling this is due to the age of its materials, rather than the use it has had over the years. A record player cracks and pops, and the lilting wail of Jimmy Page fills the air as a flannel-clad man dribbles and shoots a basketball at […]

“It’s Biology”: Zero Dark Thirty and the Politics of the Body

“In the end everyone breaks, bro. It’s biology.” Billing itself as “The Greatest Manhunt in History,” and similarly described by its director as a “first draft of history,” Zero Dark Thirty is a film that asks to be viewed as an impartial, reliable document of historical events—there is little room for the frivolities of fiction […]