Exploration of recurring themes in classic cinema, such as power, identity, morality, and family.
I Remember the Feeling of Leaving Home Every time I watch “Lady Bird,” I find myself aching for the bittersweet ache of my own youth, that moment when Sacramento—or whatever your personal Sacramento may be—suddenly feels suffocating and precious, all at once. That’s the strange paradox Greta Gerwig captures with such specificity: the longing to … Read more
Sitting in a dimly-lit theater during a retrospective screening, I remember watching “La Strada” for the first time as if I were peering through a window into both my own soul and the battered postwar Italy it conjures. It wasn’t the period costumes or Fellini’s name that struck me most; it was the silent, childlike … Read more
The Yearning Undercurrent in Every Chord The first time I watched “La La Land,” I felt like I was being both serenaded and haunted. There’s a longing in every color, every piano flourish, every stumble and step of Sebastian and Mia. For me, the film lives in the ache between what could be and what … Read more
Watching La Haine for the first time, I remember how the relentless rhythm of Paris’s banlieues pressed into me—not just as a cinematic experience, but as a visceral memory. I’d seen films about the margins before, but none left me feeling the gravity of disaffection and urgency quite as sharply. For days afterward, the black-and-white … Read more
Stumbling Through Rome’s Glitter: My Entrée into the World of “La Dolce Vita” The first time I watched “La Dolce Vita,” I felt disoriented, as if I had woken up mid-dream, dropped into the chaos of Rome’s night and left to drift alongside Marcello without a map. This film never lets me settle, because it’s … Read more
When I think of my earliest encounters with ‘L.A. Confidential,’ I don’t initially recall the detailed plot points or the big twist. Instead, I remember the way the film made me question the myth of Hollywood glamour. I was captivated by how the sunlight of 1950s Los Angeles, immortalized in cultural memory as golden and … Read more
Staring Across the Breakfast Table Watching Kramer vs. Kramer for the first time, I felt as though the film had quietly cracked open a part of me that I wasn’t prepared to examine. There’s a particular intimacy in the way the camera lingers on a father’s weary eyes, the slightly trembling hands pouring milk over … Read more
My first encounter with “Koyaanisqatsi” remains clear in my memory, not because of plot points, but the way it pulled me somewhere wordless—like stepping into a cathedral where language isn’t required. As the cityscapes stretched and time twisted, I couldn’t help but feel exposed by what I was seeing; it was as if the film … Read more
No Beauty Without the Beast: My Encounters with King Kong’s Tragic Heart I’ve never been able to watch “King Kong” (1933) without feeling a pang of sorrow, an almost physical ache that seems to radiate from the Empire State Building all the way into my chest. The first time I saw the film, as a … Read more
I can still remember the first time I watched “Kind Hearts and Coronets.” It was a late-night screening on a worn DVD borrowed from a friend who insisted I would be “utterly bewitched” – a phrase that, at the time, struck me as grandiose. Yet mere minutes in, I felt myself drawn into a world … Read more
