There's a trolley problem buried in the snow of The Ascent: The more ethical choice in war could get people killed. Individual morality, within the climate of battle, becomes as chaotic as the surrounding bloodshed. The merciful impulse which much of society is sustained by, isn't something you can trust in war. Shepitko depicts this with brutal precision and empathy and yes, it's as beautiful and anti-war as her husband's later project Come and See. It's amazing that she was…

I take trips to NYC regularly and I get that feeling of loneliness while I’m there sometimes, the kind when you’re surrounded by people, but it's like a sweet loneliness. Nostalgic maybe, though I'm not sure for what. It’s different from being alone in a small town or out in the wilderness. More often, in the city, there’s this kind of clarity. Everything feels cold and at a distance, but there’s also a stillness. The city can somehow make you…

It's a trap. The whole thing is one big trap. And while there is a way out of it, the simple path is not an easy one. Someone like Howard Beale, which today are found more in the likes of political comedians like Stewart and Colbert, will say to you, don't even listen to me. When they do this though, ratings spike. Youtubers will title their post, "i'm done" and those two words alone will draw more views than any…

It doesn’t matter what actually happened during the first showing of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat 130 years ago. What matters is that we imagine the audience screaming in terror. What matters is that a new kind of myth had been established. That the moving picture could create for us a new shared mythology. And we needed the origin itself to contain a moment of terror, some proof that the first images were as profound as we…

Sinners gets you thinking about the vampire myth, how tired it’s become. It feels like we’ve seen every possible permutation, and yet, it persists. The only time it feels vital anymore is when the vampirism isn’t the subject, but the metaphor. When it stands in for a specific kind of hunger—a form of consumption that’s far more insidious than drinking blood. Here, it's the process of turning a culture into a costume. The vampire as the ultimate appropriator.

Coogler is…

A live-action cartoon on LSD, a pop-art advertisement explosion, a giddy, glorious act of unhinged imagination. Too much for you? Come off it. This film liberates joy and ecstasy from conventional contexts and it’s way ahead of its time. The special effects, with their deliberately artificial, storybook quality, are a declaration of war against realism. It’s Japan’s Oz.

Though, Obayashi is not trying to trick you into believing what you’re seeing; he is inviting you to revel in the unbridled…