Would you believe that it’s taken six Scream movies to kill off a film studies professor? They’ve slashed their way through chatty cinephiles, a director, and other kinds of sycophants, but it isn’t until now, in Scream VI, that they’ve finally made good on their flirtation with the disposing of…

Everyone in the audience tittered away as Mitchell Winter hovered centimeters from the face of an audience member in the front row, unspooling, “What if I said, you are the single most important breath in my space? You are the first gear that turns the clock of my world.” Lean…

Two things I inherited from my mother: an unabiding love for Bringing Up Baby and an expertise in passive aggression. Few people can be passive-aggressive like my mother. It’s like it was written into her DNA, and threaded into the very cloth of her existence. It is such a significant…

what if i started using this as a blog, the way they used to exist, in the time where you say things like “what if i started a blog” and someone on the receiving end lets a shudder run through their body. i don’t know what people use medium for…

On how “Babylon” is great because it understands the experience of someone who grew up watching movies about people who party and do drugs but only recently actually started going to parties and doing drugs — As I have told my friends when defending it, my theory about Babylon, the epic cinematic blaspheming of Hollywood history and the industry’s transition from silent to sound pictures, is that it was made by someone who only recently started doing drugs. (Trying to explain the movie to my friends…

Some thoughts on seeing movies in 2022 — The first time I said it, or felt it, it was probably around June. Forgivable, although a little premature. Then again in late September. Then again a week or so later, as the New York Film Festival was closing. Then again and again and again. But as the year started…

On fascism, homonationalism, and America — (Author’s note: This essay was written for a presentation of the film as part of Kent M. Wilhelm’s Criterion Consideration series at Syndicated Bar in Brooklyn.) “Run, charge, run, buy, borrow, make, spend, run, squander, beg, run, run, run, waste, waste, waste!” Donald (Frederick Combs), who is dogged by debt…

On seeing Sondheim’s “Company” twice, and the relationship and breakup that happened in-between — Have I got a girl for you. In the 2018 revival of Company, the 1970 musical about an unmoored serial dater in the city with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by George Furth, on the West End in London, Bobbie wore a red dress, the color bright…

On David Sedaris, Mike Leigh, Tracy Jordan, and being a little out of touch — A couple of friends and I found ourselves drifting around the Upper West Side after a movie at Lincoln Center, recounting our observations as a warmish breeze ran between the negative space between us. …