Artikel
Erzählende Essays. Wie Filme scheiterten und neu bewertet wurden, Anekdoten vom Dreh, warum ein Regisseur so entschied. Vom TBS Digital Redaktionsteam.
Possession (1981) — the year a marriage and a country burned down at once
Andrzej Zulawski made a horror film about a marriage dissolving in Cold War Berlin. Isabelle Adjani won at Cannes and had a breakdown filming it. The British government banned it. Then Criterion rescued it.
A Ghost Story (2017) — what it means to outlast everyone you loved
David Lowery put Casey Affleck under a sheet and made one of the most serious films about time and grief that American cinema has produced in twenty years. It works if you have lost someone. It bores you if you haven't.
Polish horror — the buried canon nobody outside Poland talks about
Possession gets mentioned. The rest of Polish horror barely registers in anglophone film culture, despite a tradition that runs from the 1960s through to the post-communist folk-horror revival of the 2010s.
How The Thing (1982) became a cult classic by failing first
John Carpenter's body-horror landmark flopped on release. The story of how it crawled back from there.
Why everyone hates Sharknado — and why they're missing the point
There's a real difference between a film that is bad and a film that has decided to be bad. The first is a failure. The second is a craft.
The forgotten Italian giallo that built Hereditary
Ari Aster did not invent slow-burn family-curse horror. He inherited it, almost frame for frame, from a 1972 film almost no one in his audience has seen.
What Lost in Translation gets right about being bored in a hotel
Sofia Coppola's 2003 film is often described as a love story. It is, but only secondarily. Primarily it is a film about being awake at 3am in a country you don't speak.
The case for watching Heaven's Gate in 2026
One of the biggest financial disasters in Hollywood history. Looked at sober, four decades on, it's also one of the most accomplished films of the 1980s.
Why people keep rediscovering Cure (1997)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa made a horror procedural about a detective who cannot remember the case. The film has been rediscovered at least three times since release and shows no signs of stopping.
The Yugoslav Black Wave nobody mentions
Between 1963 and 1972, a group of filmmakers in Yugoslavia made some of the most politically dangerous and formally strange films in European cinema. Almost none of them are on streaming.
What 35mm cinematography actually gives you
Not a technical manual. An essay on what shooting on film stock does to an image that digital cannot quite reproduce, and why some cinematographers still choose it.
How A24 happened — and why the next A24 won't look like A24
The studio's rise was a specific set of market conditions, not a formula. Those conditions have already changed.
The Hong Sang-soo loop
Same actors. Same Seoul cafes. Same bottles of soju. 30-plus films. The unrecognized accomplishment of being mistaken for boring.
Box-office failure as the price of authorship
Cimino, Friedkin, Bogdanovich, Coppola, De Palma. Five directors who broke on expensive personal films. What we got in return.