Welcoming the New Year with finals behind, Caramelo prompts the usage of troupes and the future of storytelling with its own comedic and sensitive uniqueness. Whether it be a statement piece or a slapstick comedy, it’s important to experience films that remind us of the beauty and transformation of film.  

2025 marks the fourth year of what has now become an annual tradition: agonizing over the list, caught between performativity and pure dopamine. A few things are different this time. The industry, ever more so, is tasked with answering the existential questions regarding the ethical use of generative videos, mergers, box-office numbers, and perhaps most importantly of all, the role of advocacy cinema in the current zeitgeist, where paranoia and distrust for the government and

Every year without fail, Love Actually makes its way onto every list of classic movies to watch during the Christmas season. The film uses the overarching theme of holiday romance to bring together nine carefully crafted love stories. While Nicole Au can undoubtedly agree that this film is the perfect Christmas movie, she does an in-depth examination of each storyline to determine which ones deserve more praise than others (and to spark lively debate amongst other die-hard Lo

This article argues that Primal Fear is one of cinema’s most overlooked twist-driven thrillers. The movie follows defense attorney Martin Vail as he defends a timid altar boy, Aaron Stampler (played by none other than Edward Norton), who appears incapable of murder. As Vail’s investigation unfolds throughout the course of the movie, the film reveals layers of church abuse, legal manipulation, and moral ambiguity. Nicole Au argues that Primal Fear deserves far more recognition

This piece explores how Costa-Gavras’s Z treats politics not merely as a clash of physical power, but as a fight for narrative control. In Z, the struggle to explain an event becomes a struggle to define reality. Its ending, in withholding any sense of resolution, is what makes the film feel disturbingly modern. 

Why are people so toxic about the movie Sinners on social media? Various online behaviors such as virtue signaling, aggressive opinions, and performative media literacy all stem from a common place of wanting to belong, and nowhere is this more clear than in the Instagram and Reddit comment sections of Ryan Coogler’s racially-charged blockbuster. In this piece, Caleb Lee uses the online discourse surrounding a particular film to point out a growing failure to engage meaningfu

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon turns 25 this year, and Ang Lee’s wuxia masterpiece is still one of the most influential movies of its time and era. Blending balletic action with aching romance, the film follows two women, Jen and Yu Shu Lien, grappling with desire and duty. Michelle Yeoh delivers arguably the best performance of her career as she anchors a story that transcends expectation. Visually stunning and emotionally devastating, the film remains a rare fusion of myth,

The impossible romance at the heart of Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016), in which love, for dreamers, is both a catalyst and casualty of ambition.

In her review of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia (2025), Sadie Cho explores how the American remake of Save the Green Planet! (2003) uses a female instead of a male protagonist to question the ethics of enacting hostility towards a harmful healthcare CEO when said hostility is partly motivated by misogyny and incel ideology.

At its core, Fight Club  (1999) is a film about duality: masculine self-invention and self-destruction, chaos and control, and reality and delusion. The film's ability to reckon with these dualities simultaneously serves as a testament to its cinematic excellence. The protagonist (Edward Norton), whose name is never revealed, is introduced as a man who follows the same mundane routine and blindly buys into consumerism. He spends his nights scrolling through IKEA catalogs and

Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language (2024) takes place in a quasi-fictional city merging Winnipeg, Canada, and Tehran, Iran, where three distinct stories gradually converge. Blending absurd humor with cultural hybridity, the film explores how randomness and dislocation can reveal deeper connections between people and places. Rankin’s vision suggests that universality arises not from sameness or logical coherence, but from the fluid coexistence of difference—a cinematic space

It was the inaugural Sunday of a weekly dorm floor movie night, and for some reason, unbeknownst to me still, my friend and I had settled on watching David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive. Perhaps it was a sentiment of reminiscence catalyzed by David Lynch’s passing earlier this year, perhaps the fact that Mulholland Drive earned impressive second place on the New York Times Best Movies of the 21st Century List. One thing was for sure, however: it was an unforgettable firs

A full-length review of Eddington by staff writer Cyd Okum can be found here . Say you’re feeling really sick one day, so you visit the office of Dr. Alex Garland. Without much of an examination, he quickly diagnoses you with Civil War disease, and then proceeds to describe the long list of horrors you’re about to experience because of the disease. So, now that you’re totally freaked out, you ask, “Well, what can I do to stop those bad things from happening?” And he says, “I

If you’ve seen 1931’s Dracula , the basic formula of all subsequent adaptations will feel pretty familiar: Jonathan Harker, or some other pasty wimp with a similar name, helps his friendly Eastern European host buy an English home—after a bit of torture, his host sails off to England to steal his fiancée, and it’s finally up to Jonathan and scientist Van Helsing to defeat the vampire. This structure and the unnecessary foregrounding of its white-bread protagonist can start to

Across thirty years, Paul Thomas Anderson has built a technically masterful, emotionally rich filmography of ten strikingly distinct works. From morally ambiguous romances to portraits of lost men adrift in post-war America, his films probe the human condition through flawed, magnetic characters. With One Battle After Another newly released, it’s the right moment to revisit and rank PTA’s remarkable body of work.

My first month on Columbia’s campus certainly didn’t see me lost for words. Where conversations about arts and media flow like the runny vanilla milkshakes from JJ’s Place, whimsical debates could be found left and right. Without fail, those to do with film tended to share a common denominator: the gradual progression of “what’s new in theatres” to “what’s your take on Wes Anderson’s films” to “what movie did you grow up on” to Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie .  The Bee Movie  had

This review contains spoilers.  Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another  (Anderson) Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another  is his first movie set in the modern era, and incredibly relevant for the time. Anderson proclaims the importance of the undying spirit of revolution, even against the strongest fascist regimes, and how those who have love stand stronger and more resolute than people built around hate. It balances these ideas with thrilling action sequence

This review contains spoilers. Park Chan-wook’s newest feature film No Other Choice is a South Korean capitalist critique through a provocative lens. It follows You Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun), a “paperman” of 25 years who has been fired as a manager from his company after restructuring by the new American owners. This prompts him to plan the murders of the three other men eligible for a job opening at the successful company Moon Paper, taking them out so that he can pass the in

A scene in Luca Guadagnino’s newest feature After the Hunt rehearses a familiar confrontation. Yale professor Hank (Andrew Garfield) has been accused of sexually assaulting a student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). To his colleague Alma (Julia Roberts), with whom he shares a romantic past, he deploys every well-worn defense: Maggie tried to seduce him; she plagiarized, so she is now lying to discredit him. He even admits it sounds like a cliché.  At this point, a quarter of the way in

Now that awards season is over, let’s discuss the imposter among a multitude of Oscar-worthy films. I’m talking about none other than Emilia Pérez , Netflix’s biggest flop. Viewers’ collective agreement that the film is garbage says enough; constantly hearing about how bad this movie is causes most people to decide against watching it. With that being said, I decided to take one for the team and watch Emilia Pérez for you. I saved you 2 hours and 12 minutes of your life. You