Writing On Movies & Art Appreciation
I worked for years as a writer and senior editor at the film criticism site Bright Wall Dark Room. In 2018, Abrams Books published The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs, by my husband Ryan Stevenson and me. The book features two interviews with Wes Anderson, as well as talks with Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, Bryan Cranston, and interviews with all department heads; direct reporting from set; essays on film craft, style, and history, with an emphasis on mid-20th-century Japanese film. You can order the book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Abrams, or wherever you purchase books.
Selected Interviews
- Liv Ullmann, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- Guillermo del Toro, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- Interviews with Wes Anderson available in The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs
Selected Threads
On Watching Movies and Art Appreciation
- Movies as a dense network of choices to discuss
- No movie can withstand the weight of being "an important movie"
- The rewatch frees a movie to be what it is
- The rewatch that reveals you didn't understand it before at all
- Streaming culture keeps people in "discovery mode"
- To watch more movies, "Treat it like TV."
- The secret to cinephilia is watching half a movie at a time
- Anticipating the you on the other side of this viewing
- Looking for signs of falseness
- Seeing art in person matters
- Programming unique days of your life by seeing two movies at the theater
- Assessing Acting via "Line Readings"
- Polyphony is what fiction does best
- The ironic sincere surrealism of painter Alfredo Castañeda
- Moby Dick and understanding the universe refracted through your day job
- Listen to your music louder and watch movies in a darker room
- Finding oneself in a place to receive something
Some Concepts in Film Criticism
- The Advanced Cinephile's Path
- The "Mid Masterpiece"
- Actors who "hold it down"
- Period pieces should alienate audiences inherently
- Great directors get graded on the curve of their own work
- Some movies get celebrated merely for being a good idea for a movie
- "Shitty Mentorship" as a genre
- Film moved from "low art" to "high art" in my lifetime
- The arc of becoming a cinephile—from narrative to craft and back to narrative
- The cinematic, group-viewing experience can reveal the tone of a film
- Y2K "Mindfuck" Cinema
On Specific Films
- Interstellar, 10 years on
- Gillian Armstrong's 1994 Little Women
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the art life
- Revisiting Nolan's The Prestige
- Hal Ashby's The Last Detail
- Seeing The Sound of Music on film
- The Wicker Man (1973)
- Brainstorm
- Broadcast News
- The Northman
- Hook, children's art, and The Arena
- My favorite kid scene (from Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore)
- Period dialect and Carey Mulligan's Maestro accent
- Adapting Dune and Paul as Übermensch
- On Gene Hackman
- My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle
- Le Trou and Point-and-Click Cinema
Selected Longer-form Writing
More Recently:
- Interstellar, 10 Years On, Letterboxd (and thread on X)
- Licorice Pizza is About A Woman Embarrassing Herself, Letterboxd
- Bonnie and Clyde is One of the Great Cynical Films, Letterboxd
2016-2018:
- Towards a True Children's Cinema: On My Neighbor Totoro, Bright Wall/Dark Room (featured in the My Neighbor Totoro 30th Anniversary Special Edition Blu-Ray set)
- Witch-Craft: Why Robert Eggers is Our Next Great Filmmaker, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- Reintroducing Ingmar Bergman (with Ryan Stevenson), Bright Wall/Dark Room
- Sacred Texts and Ruined Childhoods: On Aronofsky's Noah, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- I'm a Feminist, and I Loved The Neon Demon, Gradient
- Cracking Up: On Liv Ullmann in Face to Face, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- This Mass of Conflicting Impulses: A Former Teen Narcissist Watches Margaret, Bright Wall/Dark Room
2012-16:
- First Love, Last Love: Courtship Culture and the Teen Cancer Romance, Christianity Today
- Possessed: Vertigo, through Her Eyes, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- I am Jack's Loving Eye: Suffering and Renewal in Room, Christ and Pop Culture
- Killing the Spirit of Fear: How Female Action Heroes Can Help Women Live Courageously, Christ and Pop Culture
- Bleakness and Richness: Christopher Nolan on Human Nature, The Other Journal