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Why Did He Kill Her?
A six-year-old girl watches Frankenstein in a village on the Castilian plain. She asks why the monster killed the girl. She asks why they killed the monster. Nobody answers. Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive is a film about what happens to children raised inside a silence they cannot decode.
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The Rock Was There Before Them
On the Disappearance That Refuses to Become a Mystery A Dossier on Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) The rock is six million years old. It was formed from magma — a volcanic eruption that cooled into columns of stone long before anything resembling a human being existed on the continent. By the time…
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The Hero Who Wasn’t
Five Easy Pieces, directed by Bob Rafelson and featuring Jack Nicholson, centers on Bobby Dupea, whose alluring self-narrative of running away masks deeper issues of self-destruction. The iconic diner scene belies his failure, revealing a protagonist who sabotages relationships and evades genuine emotion. The film critiques the romanticized heroism of Bobby’s story, portraying him as…
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The Loop
Inside Llewyn Davis, the Cat, and the Cruelty of Almost A Dossier on Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013) A man sings a song in a dark club. He gets beaten up in the alley outside. The film ends. Then the film begins, and he sings the same song in the same dark…
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The Greenhouse
What Burning Shows You, What It Withholds, and Why You Can’t Stop Looking A Dossier on Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) There is a scene in Burning where a young woman explains the art of mime. The trick, Hae-mi says, is not to imagine that something is there. The trick is to forget that something is…