Bright Wall/Dark Room

Please help support this on Kickstarter and help it become a reality! 🙏 👊 “A breathtaking tome featuring the extraordinary work of Tony Stella (1980 - 2026) one of the most gifted and prolific movie poster artists of his generation.”

I wrote about the 2006 movie Over the Hedge and also about being funny, being old enough, and being a former stay-at-home Dad who time-travels back to wilder moments. Thanks to @eccantwell.bsky.social & @brightwalldarkroom.com for getting it there... www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2026/10/23/o...

The Devil In the Details: The Stiflingly Chic Interiors of ROSEMARY’S BABY

I Don’t Belong In This World: On the Saltair Pavilion, Mary Henry, and CARNIVAL OF SOULS

"THE DEVILS is not your edgy-for-the-sake-of-edgy middle finger to the Church many at the time took it to be. It’s, in fact, a very religious film made by a Catholic artist trying to make sense of his own faith."

No Way To Managua: Bridging the Forces of Fate and Identity in William Friedkin’s SORCERER

“SUPERBAD is as much a time capsule of the way teenage boys talked in 2007 (about each other and women) as it is reflective of a style of popular American comedy reaching its peak.”

"I confess that I do not approach HUBIE HALLOWEEN as an exercise in answers, even though I’m guilty of thinking answers are the answer to being afraid. In my skeleton bones though, I suspect knowing does very little to prevent fearing. Fearing isn’t meaning. It’s caring with a twist."

Big Streaming doesn't want you to know that Kanopy is kind of like Amazon Prime Video except that you have to pay for Prime and Kanopy is free. Oh also Prime shows ads even though you pay for it and Kanopy doesn't show ads even though you don't pay for it. Oh and Bezos doesn't get Kanopy's data.

Sharing some truly thrilling personal news: I'm joining Desirae Embree + @aheartofgould.bsky.social to create @caughtlooking-mag.bsky.social, a new publication highlighting the very best writing about sex + the movies! More TK obviously, please sign up for our email list here: caughtlooking-mag.com

For the evening crowd

I wrote about HEAT as a midlife crisis movie for @brightwalldarkroom.com

New today on the site: The Midlife Crisis issue continues, with @dodgyboffin.com on Michael Mann’s HEAT

"Life isn’t over at this age. It’s just starting to get beautiful."

"In their (hi)stories of successful losers as well as all the winners who fail perfectly, Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein find our most human shapes."

"Seen through the prism of Samsara—the Buddhist cycle of rebirth driven by ignorance and attachment—BARTON FINK becomes a spiritual classroom wherein karma serves as teacher and each turn of the wheel offers the same lesson until it's learned."

"Fragmented, discontinuous, and piercingly personal, CAMERAPERSON is a testament to what it means to be open and alive to the variegated voices of our world."

“The further we get from AMERICAN PSYCHO’s release, the closer we get to the world it depicted. The satire becomes more pointed, but instead of being a fun indictment of the ‘80s, it becomes an unsettling reflection of the way we live now.”

"Brian De Palma's PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is decadence splashed on celluloid, a celebration of the shine of glam rock, a preemptive funeral for the scene officiated by the dark underside of the business."

"If SECONDS came out today, with its horror lens firmly trained on themes of extreme plastic surgery, dread of aging, and get-happy-quick schemes, it would likely have found a ready A24 audience and a series of Oscar nods. But in 1966, audiences hated it."

“THE MUPPET MOVIE, like all truly great art, focuses myriad points of anguished thought and feeling into a single beam of light to demonstrate, with a simplicity that belies its depth, its own magnificence.”

"Throughout their body of work, Powell and Pressburger return to the question of whether life and art can co-exist, and if the urge to live or the urge to create will win out in the end."

Hello Loneliness, I Think I’m Gonna Die: Bob Fosse’s Dance with the Five Stages of Grief in ALL THAT JAZZ

In this house there is only one acceptable AI

"The most enchanting thing about THE HUDSUCKER PROXY is its commitment to the bit. The Coen brothers put all their cards on the table, wholly investing in a fictional world that borrows from the past while bargaining on the future."

Right at the top of my list of all time favorite movies—

"MILLER'S CROSSING is a tribute film, a mafia movie made of noir’s most elegant frames: Scarface, The Conformist, Le Samourai, and The Godfather refashioned in the brothers’ comically bloody hand."

"When I recommend HUBIE HALLOWEEN to you rabidly and over-zealously—when I hum with the sweet shocked shout of an Almond Joy with two (!) almonds—what I mean is: at our most puerile and sensitive and fearful we are just as deserving of care as anybody else. Will you remember that?"

"Every shot in COLUMBUS exudes an intentionality which is controlled but not controlling, each scene an austere but life-filled canvas."

"Maybe what draws you to deep space is this species of terror: evidence of your vulnerability, but also of a primal intelligence inside you, a reminder that you’re still a feral animal somewhere within this misshapen human form."

btw we don’t “experiment” with AI, we just absolutely do not allow it. everything is human made in our little corner of the world

“ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND is a Rubik’s Cube of memory, love, loss, and regret that collapses in on itself only to become stronger in the end. It’s clever yet tender—a near impossible line to walk—jumping off endless narrative cliffs & finding its wings on the way down.”

"So prominent is the problem of whether and how to explain MULHOLLAND DRIVE, that nearly any attempt to interpret the film ends up using the film to debate interpretation."

"If many of Steven Spielberg’s films are marathon novels, DUEL is a sonnet—it has room to play because of its formal constraints."

“I hate cul-de-sacs.” @brightwalldarkroom.com revisits TFH Fearless Leader @thejoedante.bsky.social’s The ’Burbs. Then Wednesday, October 7, @tcmtv.bsky.social Does Dante: 8 PM — Matinee 10 PM — The ’Burbs 12 AM — The Howling www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2026/09/10/t...

What a brilliant and beautiful piece this is. A pleasure to read and think about.

was the joy of my life to write about my queen diane lane in UNFAITHFUL and UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN for @brightwalldarkroom.com. two movies about what it’s like to be a woman in your late 30s, the impulse to tear it all down, and the joy of building it back up instead 🖤

New today on the site: The Midlife Crisis issue continues, with @lindseyromain.bsky.social on UNFAITHFUL and UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN (🎨 by @studioralston.bsky.social)

I'm Not Me: On doubles, haunted spaces, memory, and grief in TWIN PEAKS, POSSESSION, and VERTIGO

"Like the absurdists, David Lynch brings us to the void to remind us it’s there—and to invite us to laugh into it."

"The perfection of Jan de Bont’s SPEED owes not to its exemplification of “classical” Hollywood narrative, but to the intensity of its enthusiasm for those norms."

"To be an existentialist is to commit to choosing, each moment you are alive, to persist as human—to insist on the terms by which you will pick a purposeful path through the absurdity of life on Earth." - @eccantwell.bsky.social

"In CHUNGKING EXPRESS, everything is important—every can of pineapple, every dripping towel, every loop of “California Dreamin’”—mimicking that all-encompassing feeling of infatuation. These small items hold an entire story, the heartbreak and the hope and the waiting."

Beyond the Midnight Realm: Reorienting Horror Tropes and Trans Suffering in I SAW THE TV GLOW

Watching the Wheels: Finding Meaning and Purpose in PATERSON

"L.A. STORY exists to remind us that delusion may be the only thing that belongs in the landscape, the very reason people have come this far.” - @natmissildine.bsky.social