John David Washington stars as The Protagonist in director Christopher Nolan’s Tenet
Retro Review / Personal Essay by Noah Thompson
When I saw Tenet for a second time, in December from the comfort of my home, it brought me back to the darkest period of my life.
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Retro Review by Cam Watson
The 2010’s had its fair share of films concerned with modern applications of Christian faith. Paul Schrader’s harrowing First Reformed (2017), John Michael McDonagh’s odd-but-effective Calvary (2014), and Malick’s contemplative The Tree of Life (also 2011) all hit screens within the decade, to name a few. Among these also stands Martin Scorsese’s Silence, which I saw in theaters back in 2017 and have never really stopped thinking about since.
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Retro Review / Personal Essay by Michael O’Malley
Noah, the 2014 oddball Biblical fantasy epic, directed by Aronofsky, has stuck with me. It won’t let me go, nor will the notion go away that the film’s semi-forgotten, oddball status belies that Noah is not only Aronofsky’s masterpiece but also the defining faith film of the past couple decades.
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Sandrine Bonnaire stars in director Agnès Varda’s film Vagabond.
Retro Review by Michaela Thordarson
A world of unadulterated freedom can be difficult to conceptualize. In her 1985 film Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi), Agnès Varda actualizes the life of a woman who decides to live her life drifting on the road with no home or job.
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From Beginning of the Serpentine Dance (1908) by director Segundo de Chomón
Retro Review by Reid Ramsey
It was 1897, and although the cameras were not yet moving, the people certainly were. Loie Fuller, working with the Lumiere Brothers, stamped her name on one of cinema’s earliest movements: the serpentine dance film. This movement not only represented a significant portion of early film history, but paved the way, visually, for what cinema could become.
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Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie star in director James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted
Retro Review by Allie Chadwick
Even in movies about mental illness, there is still an element of sexualisation and passive stereotypes surrounding the portrayal of women, and it is interesting to examine these ideas in the 1999 film Girl, Interrupted, wherein eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen does have sexual relations with men while she is in hospital, and her past sexual relationships are discussed by others during her stay.
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Maria Pankratz stars in director Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light
Retro Review by Nazeeh Alghazawneh
Reygadas is only interested in the very messiest components of our deepest transgressions because anything else would be the cinematic equivalent of making small talk. At the intersection of sexuality and spirituality, Silent Light explores an idea that the great Jesus-loving Kanye West so lucidly distills in his 2011 song “No Church in the Wild”: “deception is the only felony / So never fuck nobody without tellin' me.”
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Tony Chu-Wai Leung, Jacky Cheung, and Waise Lee star in director John Woo’s Bullet in the Head
Retro Review by Joseph Bullock
Concerning three disillusioned friends who leave Hong Kong for wartime Vietnam after accidentally killing a gang leader, it merges the filmmaker’s iconic heroic bloodshed with Deer Hunter style Viet Cong sequences, riot scenes laced with allusions to the Tiananmen Square massacre, and – at its start – the conventions of crime cinema.
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From left to right: Elliot Gould, Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, and Dyan Cannon star respectively as Ted, Carol, Bob, and Alice in director Paul Mazursky’s radical relationship dramedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Retro Review / Personal Essay by Ren
The beautiful thing that Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice highlights about polyamory is the necessity of radical honesty in relationships.
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Retro Review by Miranda Barnewall
I loved watching these three together and being able to see this other side of Browning’s career that I wasn’t quite aware of before.
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Retro Review by Seth Troyer
Bakshi and others attempted many different combinations to legitimize adult animation, but in hindsight, Martin Rosen’s 1982 film, The Plague Dogs sticks out from the rest. The film may indeed offer talking animals, but it refuses to pander to younger audiences. It displays gritty realism, yet its scenes of bloody violence never seem thrown in for simple horror thrills. It is an undeniably emotional experience that will shock adult viewers and children alike.
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Melanie Mayron and Anita Skinner star in director Claudie Weill’s Girlfriends
Retro Review by Miranda Barnewall
I adore Girlfriends; the premise itself would hook me, but it's also executed very well. There is not enough art that realistically explores the tensions or breakups of female friendships. While Anne and Susan’s relationship survives at the end, the mini conflicts and struggles that occur throughout the film are a result of the drastic shift in their relationship. It's reassuring to see these conflicts play out on screen and to know this is something many women grapple with in their own lives.
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Retro Review by Joseph Bullock
The stylistic vocabulary of Pale Flower is one inherited equally from Yakuza movies, existential cinema, and noir. What results is remarkably unique: a story of a disillusioned, misanthropic man becoming increasingly numbed to a landscape of isolation and violence; as well as images that stunningly evoke this world in its stark, rain-drenched textures.
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Vincent Gallo and Chloë Sevigny star in director Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny
Review by Reece Beckett
Vincent Gallo is certainly a director known for his ego. Whether it’s the scene in which he plays himself in Julie Delpy’s 2 Days In New York and buys Delpy’s soul only to keep it in a pouch on his groin, his appearance as ‘Flying Christ’ in the hilariously titled Vincent Gallo as Flying Christ or just his website (particularly the merchandising section – there is some real gold there!), he’s definitely earned that reputation. But his work as an actor and a director often also show a dedication to artistry that knows no bounds.
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Damon Wayans stars in director Spike Lee’s Bamboozled
Retro Review by Will Carr
Many filmmakers spent the year 2000 celebrating the achievements of cinema’s first century, but Spike Lee decided to tackle its failures. Bamboozled, Lee’s fourteenth feature film, is a direct criticism of how Black people and people of color have been consistently degraded and relegated to the sidelines from the beginning.
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Adèle Haenel and Pauline Acquart star in director Céline Sciamma’s debut Water Lilies
Retro Review / Personal Essay by Paige Taylor
I wish I could sit teenagers down and give them all the wisdom I learned the hard way, answer all the questions they’re too embarrassed to say out loud, and assure them that their road to adulthood might feel shitty and weird but that is 100% expected and normal. There is beauty in this adventure too. Céline Sciamma clearly feels the same way.
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Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie star in director Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Retro Review by Logan Kenny
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is maybe the only gay tragedy I’ve seen that doesn’t feel painful, that doesn’t cause a furious ache in my soul whenever I reflect on how many of us are dead. It’s the movie that reminds me that beyond the closet and the tragedy of loss, that there are millions of stories that I will never hear of people that truly loved each other.
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Adepero Oduye and Aasha Davis star in director Dee Rees’s Pariah
Retro Review by Courtney Anderson
Pariah is of the few coming-of-age stories that centers a Black girl, and one of the very few coming-of-age stories that centers a queer person. Pariah ended up being a godsend for me.
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Colin Firth and Jon Kortajarena in director Tom Ford’s A Single Man
Retro Review by Ash Baker
While I’m certainly not advocating for narratives that teeter on dangerous clichés, I think it would be dishonest if the LGBT community abandoned “sad” movies. The LGBT community is as diverse as any other, and while we are proud and happy, we are also complex human beings who are capable of sadness, fear, anger, and doubt. I’m not afraid of “sad” LGBT movies; I just want to know that, in the end, we’ll be okay.
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Retro Review by Ash Baker
Before embarking on the journey to Divine’s pepto-bismol-pink mobile home, Cookie says to her employers, “I may have to degrade myself.” This is the mindset I believe everyone should take into watching Pink Flamingos, a movie that asks its audience to laugh at such horrors as incest, kidnapping, murder, cannibalism, and many other acts of unapologetic filth.
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