5 pieces
Across the last three years, the three-hour-plus film has quietly returned to the centre of serious American cinema. An essay on what the long film does that the short film cannot.
The biopic is a genre with a default structure, and the default is almost always the problem. An argument for the biographical films that refuse the shape.
The contemporary biopic has adopted a specific form that functions as reputation management. An essay on the mechanism by which the biopic launders its subjects, and what the occasional exception does differently.
The most consistent artistic project in English-language cinema of the last decade has not been a movement or a style. It has been a subject: grief, treated with a specific patience that the previous decade did not allow.
Letterboxd's aggregate star rating is now the first thing most viewers see about a film, and it is quietly replacing the job criticism used to do. An argument against treating aggregation as judgement.