We are in a subtext crisis. 

A sea of dry, empty, drivel. The characters tell you what they believe so explicitly you aren’t asked to look past the surface at all. There is constant mention of the state’s oppression - a reality that’s made even more evident by the oppressing upper class we spend most of the film with - but there’s next to nothing that actually shows it. We get a whole chunk of movie about Snow’s time as…

I am an appetite…nothing more…

***

Nosferatu is a gorgeous, well made movie, with a couple standout performances and incredibly strong moments. Frustratingly, though, it is also a movie that sometimes fails to capitalize on its rich aesthetic choices to deliver a story with the juice to match. 

This film doesn’t merely mark Eggers’ extraordinarily bold choice to remake what is pretty unquestionably the foundational horror movie, but also a choice to retell the Dracula story for yet another time. Perhaps…

Hud is - at least ostensibly - a revisionist western about an America at a crossroads. The crossroads between selfish capitalism and selfless moralism, between the Baby Boomers’ views on the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation, between the Old West and modernity, the present and the past.

All of these grand ideas swirl around the fate of a family ranch in West Texas. A West Texas, by the way, which is characterized beautifully by James Wong Howe. The expanse…

“He’s a taker”

“A what?”

“Some people take, some people get took. And they know they're getting took and there's nothing they can do about it”

***

The Apartment is the story of two people who are jaded from being stepped on and used their entire professional lives finding love in the last place they’d expect - each other. It is about as good an execution of its premise as I could reasonably expect thanks to great writing and acting.…