In recent years, viewers have increasingly tuned into the vapid online interfaces of TikTok and Instagram, while turning away from similar images rendered on the cinema screen. In her essay, Asha Ahn examines why contemporary film has struggled to capture modern internet culture while keeping its audience engaged, and how filmmakers are grappling with shifting perceptions of our digital lives.

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,

Jean Rollin’s films blur the line between dream and death, portraying women as extravagantly spectral figures who resist definition. Through repetition, eroticism, and through decay of what is expected from female characters, his cinema mirrors writer Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine—feminine writing. Fluid, nonlinear, drawing strength in its bark as its roots soak up all emotionality. Rollin’s female characters speak in symbols, not logic; their sensuality becomes power, no

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

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Dune: Part Two have divided critics over whether their environmental themes are too subtle to be effective, with some arguing that the films’ grand spectacle overshadows their ecological intent. Kallen Zborovsky-Fenster challenges this notion, contending that Villeneuve’s visual storytelling and immersive world-building make the threat of climate collapse more emotionally tangible. Through symbolic imagery rather than overt messaging, Villeneuve re

In Sam Witt’s piece, she argues that horror films critically examine the reflections of fears present in society, allowing us to share connection over our anxieties.

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

The 82nd Venice Film Festival took place from August 27th to September 6th, 2025. Ray Wu reflects on his experience attending the festival. This piece mixes travel notes, festival tips, and personal impressions with brief film reviews.

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

In a small, quiet Pennsylvania neighborhood, Archer (Josh Brolin), armed only with a phone light and a relentless drive to recover his lost son, enters the dark basement of a house that's become an epicenter of strange happenings in this sleepy town. As we’re dragged alongside Archer, searching through a pitch-black sea of deadpan, motionless children, we’re treated to one of the most striking jump scares in the film as a creature emerges from the shadows and lunges towards o

What could possibly be more terrifying than the reality Americans wake up to every day? Certainly not the typical horror films filled with witches, vampires or zombies, which may carry some allegorical weight but rarely land with the force they intend to. No, the real horror is watching our leaders lie on national television, appoint officials who echo the language and behavior of fascists, and watching our basic human rights erode in real time while the country collectively

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.

Alejandro Amenábar’s debut Thesis fuses horror and thriller to probe our fascination with violence. This essay explores its metafilmic nature, tracing how voyeurism and desire emerge through plot, form, and setting—offering a prophetic reflection on today’s audience.

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