College is one place where disparate class positions can become obscured and an innocent romance can lead to the marriage of two people from across a wide class spectrum. Another is the party scene (aka da clurb), where pulsing music, free-flowing substances, and flashing lights temporarily dissolve class distinctions into a mass of moving bodies.

I was initially drawn to this movie for its clear-eyed focus on the class positions and corresponding emotional experiences of the sex worker and the…

The purpose of psychoanalysis is to help the patient to find a way to live in the present. The premise of Kore-eda's film flips this over, giving the subjects, who have recently died, one last short treatment to allow them to make peace with their pasts and to finally cease to live. The attendants at the facility act as receptive listeners whose job it is to help the patients to sift through their memories in search of the one that…

From Hitler to David Bowie, this little essay film chop-chop-chops its way through the Rolodex of 20th century figures we can't seem to get off the brain. (Possibly because essay films like this keep reminding us of them. [I stand corrected, there are indeed shots of a drowned migrant child (?).])

Carax plays with us, like memory playing tricks -- there's my father, there, no, there, him, him, no the other one. The first lesson of media literacy: images betray. We…