Image credit: Warner Home Video “Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure,” writes Tara Westover in her 2018 memoir Educated. Recounting her time as a severely cash-strapped college student, she explains why her academic performance was hindered by...
Image credit: Grasshopper Film To give—what a startling idea in this era of acquisitive capitalism. But every aspect of Valérie Massadian’s filmmaking is a study in reciprocity. It’s in her patient camerawork, which takes in the physical gestures that often replace...
Image credit: Milestone Films Margot Benacerraf’s 1959 film Araya opens with a horizontal pan over freeze-framed clouds: movement within stillness. It’s an apt first image for a film portraying a community in motion, frozen in time. Over aerial shots of arid land as...
Image credit: Artistic License The monotony of modern office culture and its attendant angst are rarely treated as carefully as they are in Clockwatchers (1997), Jill Sprecher’s directorial debut. As a softer, more subtle precursor to Office Space (1999),...
Image credit: Oscilloscope Josephine Decker, director of the 2018 experimental drama Madeline’s Madeline, said in an interview that while studying literature in college, she became “obsessed with this concept of the narrator.”[i] She was drawn to epic novels (like One...
Image credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures In 1961, journalist and activist Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a groundbreaking work arguing that urban spaces flourish when meaningful human relationships are structurally nurtured.[i] In...
