Film essays: what the film is about, what it says about life and which ideas to keep. Linked to topics and interview moments.
A quiet road movie about a woman who, after losing her home and her husband, chooses life on the road in a van — not as an escape but as a way to grieve and live at once.
A drama about dementia told not as an outside view of an ill man but as an attempt to make the viewer experience, from within, the unraveling of one's own grip on reality.
A comedy of manners that gradually curdles into a taut parable about how poverty and wealth learn to impersonate each other — and what that impersonation costs.
A film about loving someone so much you decide to lie to them about the most important thing — and about the cultural gulf that makes that lie feel like care to some and betrayal to others.
A film documenting climber Alex Honnold's ropeless ascent of the three-thousand-foot face of El Capitan — one in which the camera crew fears for its subject's life as much as the audience does.
A young writer returns to his provincial hometown after finishing university — a film about how hard it is for someone full of ambition and contempt for other people's compromises to notice he's already begun repeating…
A story about a family assembled not by blood but by a mutual choice to look after one another — and the price paid for that care outside the law.
One person's coming of age told through three different actors in three different bodies — a film about how an outer mask of toughness and an inner vulnerability can share one life without ever quite reconciling.
A film about a man carrying guilt so overwhelming that even other people's sincere forgiveness cannot lift it.
A chronicle of Amy Winehouse's short life, built from home video and amateur footage shot long before fame — a film about how a rare talent and a fragile psyche become prey for an industry and a crowd.
A portrait of an aging actor trying to prove to himself and the world that something real once existed beneath the mask of success.
A chamber drama about how easily rigor is mistaken for cruelty, and the hunger for greatness for self-destruction.
Linklater shot this film over twelve real years with the same actor, so the growing up on screen isn't makeup or a montage trick — it's literally elapsed time.
An aging Roman writer, famous for decades on the strength of a single novel, drifts through the city's nocturnal high society searching for a beauty that once felt obvious and now keeps slipping away.
A week in the life of a talented but luckless folk musician — a film about talent that isn't enough when timing and circumstance work against you.
A film in which the organizers of mass killings in 1960s Indonesia are invited to reenact their own crimes in the film genres they love — and the camera records how their self-glorification slowly turns against them.
A detective story about a Detroit musician who released two albums to indifference at home, unaware that on the other side of the world he had long been regarded as a legend.
A ruthlessly precise film about how love turns into caring for a body that is dying in front of you.
A quiet study of an eighty-year-old sushi master who has spent decades refining the same craft in a tiny restaurant with no room for casual walk-ins — a film about what a calling looks like when taken to its absolute…
A family drama that, through one domestic conflict, unfolds into a precise study of how truth, protective lies, and competing notions of duty coexist inside ordinary people.
A dying father's race to set right what he can — his children, his conscience, the people caught in his shadow economy — before time runs out.
Footage shot inside the Chauvet Cave, accessible to only a handful of scientists a year — a film that stages an encounter with thirty-two-thousand-year-old drawings as though its director cannot quite believe what he…
A portrait of racing driver Ayrton Senna assembled entirely from archival footage, with not a single new on-camera interview — a rare case of a documentary that plays like a finished drama.
A story of how a brilliant idea and its creator's social wounds turn into an empire — and a trail of broken relationships along the way.