Bright Wall/Dark Room January 2024: Making Peace With Our Distractions: On Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up | Features

One teacher (James Le Gros) even calls out the value of surprise in his own work. “There’s spontaneity in that pot. It’s its own thing,” he says, as he passes a vase around a circle of students. The sentiment applies to all of the art in the film: the way Lizzy intends for her sculptures … Read more

Bright Wall/Dark Room September 2023: I Used to Float, Now I Just Fall Down by Lindsay Romain | Features

But it’s also synthetic—a resin dream that can only stave off corporeality so long. Isn’t that childhood, too? It’s girlhood almost certainly. Ephemeral and abrupt. Irretrievable once you’ve left it behind. I. Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes Silver-white winters that melt into springs These … Read more

Bright Wall/Dark Room August 2023: My Money is Still in Your Pocket by Sarah Welch-Larson | Features

– Process filmmaking is crucial to the heist plot: the heist is only exciting if the audience understands just how difficult the job is in the first place. The stakes and constraints must be set up, just so; the thieves need to be competent at their jobs in order to make the heist’s stakes plausible, … Read more

Bright Wall/Dark Room June 2023: Yentl and the Three-Quarter Profile by S. Brook Corfman | Features

“So why was I born a woman?” “Even Heaven makes mistakes.” This feels so distinctly a trans narrative that I actually gasped when I read it. When I was young, I too thought heaven had made a mistake in the form given to me. I asked this question, about whether that form was a mistake, … Read more

Bright Wall/Dark Room April 2023: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed: Friends, Lovers, or Neighbors by Frank Falisi | Features

David Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1954. Red Bank is located in Monmouth County, a suburban subset just west of the New Jersey shoreline. The borough is bound on its north edge by the Navesink River, an estuary that made Red Bank a popular site for shipbuilding in the early 17th … Read more