Good Grief: Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers
“Solving” the film’s psychological mysteries – understanding how Adam’s ghosts arise from his grief – is the film’s central interpretive demand, and one of its pleasures. It’s the film’s conclusion[…]
Author: David Hathwell
David Hathwell is a poet, musician, and former English teacher. His collected poems, The Power of the Telling, appeared in 2019. This is his fifth contribution to Bright Lights.
The New Old West Side Story
The Sharks and Jets may have been initially inspired by Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues, but the gang members we see are really first cousins of the “troubled youth” in popular[…]
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African American · Drama · LGBT & Queer · Sex & Relationships
Looking Back at Moonlight
The visual style shows people as essentially solitary, a remarkable choice of perspective in view of the importance of the wider social realities – racial and sexual – that “create”[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · SF & Fantasy
A Fine Romance? On Call Me by Your Name
As in romance novels, the excitement of sexual provocation is the heart of the story. It occupies two-thirds of the film: “His finger brushed mine” developed in fifteen stages. The[…]
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life: An Outsider’s View
The Tree of Life seems to excite fanatical devotion. The reactions to the film heard, for example, on Filmspotting, from both the podcast’s commentators and its listeners, have an uncritical[…]
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