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Anton Chigurh is a scary villain for many reasons, but the scariest might just be his inevitability. In 2007, America was exhausted; two failed wars and a collapsing economy were taking its toll, and there was a sense that the world was slipping out of control. Into that void walked a quiet assassin with a…
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Coming off the brutal experience of making (and releasing) THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, Martin Scorsese took a detour into the world of short films, crafting his own entry for the anthology film NEW YORK STORIES. Titled LIFE LESSONS, this short stars Nick Nolte and Patricia Arquette as a successful artist and his ambitious muse,…
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A young Martin Scorsese made a first film so raw and personal that it almost never saw the light of day. Don’t miss our full breakdown on WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR?, part of our Martin Scorsese series exclusively on Patreon!
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Christopher Nolan had made billion-dollar blockbusters, superhero epics, and films that bent the fabric of spacetime itself. So what does the most technically ambitious director of his generation do next? He strips everything back. With 2017’s DUNKIRK, Nolan created one of the most audacious structural experiments in modern cinema. This video explains how he did…
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The night of August 9th, 1969 saw the grisly murder of Sharon Tate — and the dream of an entire decade. Quentin Tarantino was just six years old at the height of Los Angeles’ Manson era, and had to witness the killing of the Hollywood he had just started falling in love with. His 2019…
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After the catastrophic production of Alien 3, David Fincher was done with Hollywood. Studios had hijacked his vision and released a film that bore his name but not his authorship. He swore off feature filmmaking altogether, retreating to his comfort zone of music videos and commercials. Then a script called Se7en started circulating, with a…
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 film LICORICE PIZZA is part of a wave of nostalgia-laden films from directors set during their own personal formative years — a wave that includes ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD, THE FABELMANS, and ROMA. However, Anderson sets out to do something very different with his 70’s period piece, digging deep…
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In 1956, a 27-year-old Stanley Kubrick made a heist film with a structural idea so unusual that test audiences demanded it be re-cut in chronological order. “The Killing” tells the story of a $2 million racetrack robbery, told from the fractured perspectives of the heist’s crew. It was one of the first American films to…
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What does the birth of the universe actually look like… and how could you possibly film it? When he was making THE TREE OF LIFE, director Terrence Malick bypassed the computer and reached for the phone. The man on the other line was none other than Douglas Trumbull, famous for his groundbreaking work on Stanley…
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In 2006, Sofia Coppola premiered “Marie Antoinette” at Cannes… and the audience booed. Critics missed the point entirely, calling it shallow and self-indulgent. Worst of all, it wasn’t historically accurate. Twenty years on, “Marie Antoinette” endures as one of the most misunderstood American films of the 2000s. It lives as a radical act of anachronistic…
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What happens when a film is so original that nobody knows what to do with it? In 1998, Joel and Ethan Coen released The Big Lebowski — fresh off the massive critical success of Fargo. Critics were confused, and audiences stayed home. By every conventional Hollywood measure, it was a failure. Slowly but surely, The…
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Christopher Nolan has spent his entire career dismantling our relationship with time. In this video essay, we explore how Nolan’s INTERSTELLAR represents one of his most fully-realized artistic statements — informed by his signature obsessions with time, architecture, mathematics, and literature. Watch the full breakdown on INTERSTELLAR — as well as other longform breakdowns on…