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There Will Be Blood (2007) Review: A Portrait of Ambition, Greed, and Isolation

If you’ve seen even one film by Paul Thomas Anderson, you already know you’re not walking into a conventional movie.

His films are difficult to describe because they rarely fit neatly into familiar genres. Magnolia starts as a collection of seemingly ordinary stories before evolving into an intricate web of connections—and eventually ends with frogs literally falling from the sky. …

The Departed (2006) Review: A Brilliant Thriller That Doesn't Survive Scrutiny

Here’s a piece of advice:

Don’t rewatch movies you absolutely loved.

Especially if it’s been ten years.

Especially if they left a huge impression on you the first time.

Some films belong to the person you were when you first saw them. Revisiting them years later can feel less like returning to an old friend and more like discovering that the magic was partly your own. …

Traffic (2000) Review: Drugs, Family, and a System That Never Changes

Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, inspired by the 1989 British TV miniseries, takes a broad look at the drug trade by splitting its story into three mostly independent plotlines.

1. Javier Rodriguez — the honest cop in Mexico

This storyline focuses on corruption, the blurred line between cartels and government, and the impossible position of decent people trapped inside a broken system.

It also …

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) Review: The Horror Behind the Mystery

From its very conception, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was inseparable from the television series that preceded it. Almost every aspect of the film gains meaning through its relationship with the original Twin Peaks.

Yet David Lynch made an extraordinarily risky decision. Rather than continuing the story audiences wanted to see, he made a prequel centered on two events viewers already knew the …

Wild at Heart (1990) Review: Love, Violence, and the Dark Side of the American Dream

Among David Lynch’s films, Wild at Heart stands apart for the sheer intensity of its genre-blending, its feverish atmosphere, and its relentless energy. Lynch had the good fortune of adapting Barry Gifford’s novel Sailor and Lula, written by an author steeped in noir fiction, and that influence runs throughout the film. The novel is often described as hard-boiled crime fiction, with a …

Blue Velvet (1986) Review: Beneath the Surface of American Innocence

After the commercial and critical failure of Dune, David Lynch believed his Hollywood career might already be over. In the 1980s, directors who delivered expensive flops rarely got a second chance. Lynch himself later admitted that Dune was never the right project for him. Large-scale science fiction wasn’t his natural territory—his imagination worked best on a much smaller canvas, where …

Mulholland Drive (2001) Review: The Hollywood Dream That Turns Into a Nightmare

Mulholland Drive is the third David Lynch film that can roughly be divided into two distinct halves.

The first half began life as a television pilot for ABC, and it shares a lot of DNA with the Twin Peaks pilot. It revolves around a central mystery, introduces a large cast of characters, and unfolds at a deliberately slow pace.

The second half feels like pure Lynch—an intensely surreal, dreamlike …

The Straight Story (1999) Review: A Quiet Journey of Forgiveness

David Lynch’s The Straight Story is often described as the great exception in his filmography. Many people argue that it was less a David Lynch film than a project driven by his longtime collaborator and partner Mary Sweeney, who brought him the finished screenplay while Lynch simply embraced the idea. That interpretation is usually tied to where Lynch’s career stood in the late 1990s. …