Dispatches from the VTIFF
Cinephiles are an easily jaded lot. Most any such obsessive will admit to a similar mounting disenchantment. Call it building a tolerance. Even so, taking as deathly-serious [...]
Articles by Oliver O'Sullivan
Don Jon: Kuleshov in the Information Age
Over the last 20,000 years, our brains have gotten smaller. There are several schools of thought on this seemingly counterintuitive evolutionary turn of events, which, at [...]
Bending Horror to the Breaking Point: Office Space
When you open an album with this lyric: “Okay, I think by now we’ve established/Everything is inherently worthless/And there’s nothing in the Universe/With any [...]
The Disquieting Clarity and Throbbing Dread of It Follows
Every so often, we happen on moments of heightened clarity, when the veils are lifted and all seems to cohere. For me, Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself [...]
Drunk History vs. The History Channel
Thanks to Stephen Colbert and his rabid fan-base, the neo-emotivist doctrine of “Truthiness” is a real word, and has been for nearly a decade now. It has a definition, [...]
Competing Perceptions Part II: Phoenix
James Stewart almost quit acting after WWII. He needed to reassess, and, to some extent, he had to be coaxed back after his combat experience. Hitchcock helped with this [...]
Competing Perceptions Part I: The End of the Tour
James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour comes down to a hug or a handshake. It’s a meandering two-hander road movie-cum-biopic with wall-to-wall dialogue and oodles of [...]
Show Me a(n) (Anti-)Hero
“Ice Town” was not all Ben Wyatt’s fault: he was just a kid, and Cindy Eckert had just turned him down for prom, after all. What’s a boy-mayor to do—go big! [...]
The Dream Logic of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp
At the very end of No Country for Old Men, Tommy Lee Jones’ beleaguered sheriff, who has been on the trail of a hardened assassin and an in-over-his-head mark, recounts [...]
Alternate Unrealities: The Music Videos of Paul Thomas Anderson
Decades from now, when/if people talk about movies from today—that is, when they’re not too busy with their inevitable machine uprising—they will undoubtedly pinpoint [...]
*Dusk Magazine 