Our actions reveal what our speech by itself cannot. The Fog is one of John Carpenter’s greatest accomplishments. Its story is elegant in its simplicity, its visuals sumptuously forlorn, and its score seeps spectral sequences of tones which linger in the viewer’s mind long after its final frame. Unlike many horror films, The Fog (1980) is notable for relying on silence, natural sound, and music to carry its forward motion, like the tide sweeping forgotten items out to sea.  Not only forgotten items, though, but forgotten histories as well. Vengeance and the corruption of memory are the primary motifs explored…

“An outline would be helpful at this point,” an editor warns the young Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) in Wildcat. And viewers might feel the same about Ethan Hawke’s film itself by the time the credits roll. Hawke is trying to suggest something about how we should respond to the hypocrisy of other believers. For several critics, Wildcat felt like a disorienting experience. After all, it’s one part anthology, providing a more-or-less accurate depiction of five or six of O’Connor’s southern Gothic short stories. But it’s also one part biography, depicting both a pivotal season in O’Connor’s life, and various flashbacks…

Back in July, noted English literature professor Karen Swallow Prior responded to a Politico article examining V.P. nominee JD Vance’s naming of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) as a leading influence on his political views. She declared the news indicative of “the rise of the Fantasy generation,” thanks to Vance’s status as a millennial—someone who came of age during the rise of Peter Jackson’s blockbuster film trilogy based on Tolkien’s books. I too have found my personal and political views heavily informed by Fantasy literature via a very different body of work: the comic book. In her…

What if a profession or institution devoted to looking after others stops caring and stops nurturing? “We cook to nurture people.” Years before the events that make up the bulk of The Bear’s third season, real-life acclaimed chef Thomas Keller relayed this mission statement from his mentor to fictional chef Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) in a flashback to Carmy’s first day at the French Laundry. But what if a profession or institution devoted to looking after others stops caring and stops nurturing? What if salt, one of the most basic elements of the kitchen, loses its saltiness? Season 3…

Perpetual Questing The core of our identity is defined by what we love, and the purpose of our lives is the pursuit of this love.1 Yorgos Lanthimos’s extraordinary film, Poor Things (2023), is a cinematic demonstration of this reality played out in the lives of odd, brilliantly acted characters living in a spectacularly off-kilter world. Lanthimos is a master at creating worlds mostly resembling our own, yet possessing an oddly affected bent that reflects a dark and scathing image of our world.2 Poor Things uses its skewed world to testify to the disordered nature of our modern longings and our…