2023 New Members’ Favorite Movies
To celebrate our new class of members, we have compiled a list of their favorite movies and why they love them. Get to know our new writers and check out these films!
Luke Weidemoyer: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
My favorite film is David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. It’s admittedly not the most well-made, best acted, or smartly written movie out there. But its incredible blend of terror (both surreal and terrifyingly real), unforgettable imagery, and unrelenting authenticity make Fire Walk with Me the most moving and personal film I’ve ever seen.
Allie Frydrych: Chasing Amy
Under the veil of a promising romance, Chasing Amy explores toxic masculinity and sexual insecurity in a whip-smart battle of the sexes, while providing a surprisingly progressive glimpse at queer subcultures. Director Kevin Smith’s own background as a comic book aficionado manifests through his detailed backdrops and animated sequences that present a dazzling counterpart to the sharp-witted dialogue.
Henry Franklin: Seven Samurai
Seven Samurai is my favorite film. I can still remember the rainy Sunday afternoon when I saw it for the first time. I was twelve. My whole family watched it together, since my dad—himself a recovering cinephile—thought we all ought to be exposed to masterpieces of world film. And from the first frame of Kurosawa’s opus, my love of cinema was forever ignited.
Cole Hanover: The Fugitive
My favorite film is Davis' The Fugitive. Apart from putting two powerhouses, Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, on the opposite side of the law in a suspense-chase-thriller with a spunky score, it's also a beautiful exploration of the city of Chicago, with many locations very close to my home. Every single scene keeps me on the edge of my seat no matter how many times I watch, and I just love an action film where the hero doesn't need to be an expert marksman/tactician, just a smart, resourceful guy.
Aden Berger: Boogie Nights
My favorite film is Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film is a perfect synthesis of Scorsese and Altman. Never has a movie been so funny and so tragic at the same time. Anderson’s live wire direction and pitch perfect script allow a cast full of some of the best actors of the last 30 years to soar. Boogie Nights began my obsession with movies. After seeing some of the things Anderson pulled off in this film, such as the Alfred Molina scene near the end(the scariest, funniest, weirdest scene ever put to film), I knew this was an all time classic.
Popular Reviews
Project Hail Mary is an adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2021 novel of the same name. It follows science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) after he wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there. As his memory returns, he also gains an unlikely friendship in Rocky the Eridian alien. The acting is great, the screenplay is charming and full of heart, and the visuals are striking.
If you asked most people a few years ago who was “winning” indie horror, the answer would've been obvious: A24, of course. But between 2021 and now, something shifted. Not all at once and not always clearly, but deliberately. While A24 horror started to feel scattered, Neon built something more strategic.
What’s interesting is that Neon didn’t start with a clear horror identity at all. It was built over time, and I track that evolution in three distinct pseudo-phases: pre-Titane, post-Titane, and post-Longlegs. Each phase had a different strategy. First it was discovering talent, then experimenting with identity, and finally scaling into something that looks a lot like dominance.
Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of one of the most important filmmakers of all time. In early November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered. Perhaps the killing was carried out by the militant right-wing group Banda della Magliana–or maybe by an overzealous fan. The case remains open in Rome after the original suspect retracted his confession more than twenty years ago.
I undertake to rank all twelve of Pasolini’s feature films. Of course, the scope of his oeuvre extends beyond these; I recommend in particular his street documentary Love Meetings and his excellent meta short film La Ricotta.
Emerald Fennell said as much herself: "The thing for me is that you can't adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book. I can't say I'm making ‘Wuthering Heights.’ It's not possible. What I can say is I'm making a version of it." She put the title in quotation marks intentionally, providing a disclaimer that this film is not the classic text. Every adaptation imposes a vision, turning the source material into something else.
Even the most devoted cinephiles rarely tune in to the nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. Most film buffs, myself included, don’t make it to the short film programs or indie showcases where these films typically screen, and many of them quickly disappear into obscurity after their premieres. Perhaps because of this invisibility, documentary shorts have the potential to carry some of the sharpest political messages in today’s cinema. This year’s nominees certainly exemplify this potential, covering urgent topics like gun violence, war, protest, reproductive rights, and, um, wandering donkeys. Despite their small audiences, these films deserve a closer look. They are brimming with provocative voices, even if this year’s particular batch sometimes fails to stick the landing.
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