Emma Seligman’s decision to detach ‘Bottoms’ from the present day is a missed opportunity that diminishes the movie’s significance — Although the teen comedy Bottoms is entertaining, it’s a bit of drag that the 28-year-old director Emma Seligman has more to say about movies than she does about life. In true genre fashion, the story follows PJ (Rachel Sennott, who also co-wrote the script with Seligman) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri)…

In his 2019 op-ed “A Nation of Weavers,” The New York Times columnist David Brooks claims that “we’re living with the excesses of 60 years of hyperindividualism.” Brooks explains, “There’s a lot of emphasis in our culture on personal freedom, self-interest, self-expression, the idea that life is an individual journey…

To call Passages a romance would be an insult to anyone who’s ever been in love. It plays more like a horror movie, and the monster to be fearful of is that insufferable ex we all wish we never met, but during our worst moment of weakness, we fell under…

Within the first few seconds of the documentary Children of the Mist, director Ha Le Diem reclaims a part of the world in Northern Vietnam that too many white, middle-class Westerners have colonized with their Sapa mountain treks and homestay visits. Contrary to the Instagram posts you may have seen…

For over 20 years, the artists in Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) have been quietly redefining the documentary form, often to little fanfare outside of academic circles. Led by director Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the lab’s mission is to promote “innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography,” with interdisciplinary projects ranging from audio-video…

The movie offers thought-provoking commentary on female desire and agency, patriarchy, and the hypocrisy of fundamentalist thinking — The Starling Girl isn’t a great movie, but it’s an important one that shines a light on a rarely glimpsed Christian fundamentalist community without mocking its believers or giving them a pass for behaving badly in the name of god. …

There’s a brief exchange in the episode “Honeydew” that sums up creator Christopher Storer’s thesis statement with The Bear. One of the characters Marcus (Lionel Boyce), an aspiring pastry chef, is tasked with developing three desserts for the opening of a new restaurant in Chicago. To seek inspiration, he travels…

These movies represent the best of LGBTQ cinema — In The Celluloid Closet, a classic study of homosexuality in cinema, historian Vito Russo writes, “Any story dealing, however seriously, with homosexual love is taken to be a story about homosexuality while stories dealing with heterosexual love are seen as stories about the individual people they portray.” Russo died of…

It was the best of times, it was, well, another brutal reminder that mediocre nostalgia trips like The Super Mario Bros. Movie continue to be embraced by the masses. But as always, good and great movies are there for those willing to look, pay attention, make an effort, and open…