the kino park

Emma Stone and Deirdre O'Connell spiraling into conspiracy *while this essay does not contain any overt spoilers to the film, it would likely be understood better and appreciated further after viewing* The western has always been about space. The spaces between settlements, between cultures, between familial divides. The vastness of the American west served as the perfect backdrop for valorizing the violent men of the new nation’s mythology, yet in the lens of certain filmmakers, it also served as a defaultly alienating space. As a swallowing hole of equally great beauty and suffocation. This, often as subtext, is certainly present in the films of John Ford though it becomes more overt in newer films like Meek’s Cutoff from Kelly Reichardt and now with Ari Aster’s truly modern western Eddington. The film divorces the western’s traditional devotion to the past and plants its feet firmly in the volatile soil of May 2020, a date that should cause at the very least a shudder down the s...

     one of the more dynamic images in Thunderbolts* * this review includes non-specific spoilers for the film*      Perhaps it is surprising, if tragically still not a saving grace, that the first Marvel movie in several years to actually somewhat get me, if not to the theater then at least to press play, features its characters grappling to reconcile “nothingness.” In the six plus years that have somehow elapsed since Avengers: Endgame , it has become a conventional take that the once mighty Marvel Studios has lost its way, however, as can happen, sometimes convention is accurate. Even allowing for the odd glimmer of life, the (seemingly) endless onslaught of Marvel properties of the past few years have by and large verged from outright unwatchable to merely poorly made. Diagnoses for these conditions have come from everywhere and everyone, perhaps even all at once, and while I readily admit that I held on longer than some, quitting somewhere around Moon ...