The Library of America blog has an essay and an excerpt from Joan Didion’s “L.A. Noir.” “Around Division 47, Los Angeles Municipal Court, the downtown courtroom where, for eleven weeks during the spring and summer of 1989, a preliminary hearing was held to determine if the charges brought […]
Friend of the Gutter Jessica Ritchey on Beverly Cleary and ordinary lives at RogerEbert.com. “Her books taught children to see the worlds they grew up in as universes unto themselves. That adventure could be found in exploring the woods behind your house or in writing letters to someone […]
Friend of the Gutter Sara Century looks at the Amityville franchise at Manor Vellum. “The Amityville Horror may not be especially unique at its root when viewed through the eyes of modern audiences. After all, today’s genre fans have seen similar stories in countless films, including, but not […]
[Content warning: suicide.] While flipping through the new options on an Indian streaming service I subscribe to*, I discovered Shakeela, a film that actually managed to release in cinemas in December 2020. Almost all of the Indian films that I heard discussed with any vigor in 2020 were […]
Anne Billson writes about disaster movies for Perspective. “You can’t say we weren’t warned. Our elected representatives might have been more aware of the speed at which a deadly virus can spread around the world if only they had paid more attention to films like Contagion, in which […]
At A24’s blog, Foster Kamer explores the history of 1990s movie theater carpeting. There are interviews! “My own version of the Odyssey was the UA Showcase in the late 1990s in the Las Vegas Strip. The memory of the place is hazy (though I remember stumbling out of […]