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Roma Is Not About a Family. It’s About the Woman Who Carried It on Her Back While It Looked the Other Way.
The Floor The first image in Roma is a floor being washed. Water moves across tiles. A mop enters the frame. The water pools and spreads and reflects, for a brief moment, a plane crossing the sky overhead. Then the mop returns and the reflection disappears and the floor is clean, and someone will walk…
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Is Not About Combat. It’s About Bodies That Can Only Be Honest in the Air.
The Ground Rules On the ground, in Qing dynasty China, no one says what they mean. Li Mu Bai loves Yu Shu Lien. He has loved her for years. She has loved him for years. Neither of them says so. He circles the declaration. She deflects. They speak in the language of duty, obligation, honor,…
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Every Institution Says This Family Isn’t Real. Look at Them.
They eat together. This is the first thing you need to know about the family in Shoplifters, and it is the thing Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to again and again, because it is the foundation of everything he is arguing. They sit around a low table in a house too small for all of them, and…
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The War in The Banshees of Inisherin Is Not the One on the Mainland.
Pádraic Súilleabháin goes to his friend’s house at two o’clock, the way he always does, to walk to the pub together, the way they always do, for a pint, the way they always have. Colm Doherty does not answer the door. This is the inciting incident of The Banshees of Inisherin, and it is, on…
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Nobody Tells the Truth in Rashomon. That’s Not the Point.
It is raining. Three men sit beneath a ruined gate. The gate is enormous, crumbling, a relic of something that was once grand. The rain falls in sheets. The men have nowhere to go. They have time. And one of them says he does not understand what happened. This is the frame. This is where…