Author: Grace Cogan
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The Disappointment of “Song Sung Blue”
Pauline Kael’s reputation as a revered film critic rests not merely on taste but on nerve. Her refusal to bow before Citizen Kane—a film embalmed by decades of reverence—remains one of the most liberating gestures in American criticism. Kael reminds us that criticism is not a moral obligation to admire greatness but an honest reckoning with…
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The Quiet Power of “Sentimental Value”
There is a particular stillness that defines Sentimental Value—a stillness that does not signal emptiness, but accumulation. This is a film made of layers: of time pressing down on space, of memory embedded in architecture, of emotion stored rather than expressed. From its opening moments, it announces itself as a work uninterested in urgency. Instead, it…
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Between Grief and Fury: The Cinematic Crossroads of the 2026 Best Picture Race
In most years, the Best Picture race functions like a polite procession: a few respectable prestige dramas, a technical marvel or two, perhaps one crowd-pleasing juggernaut that reassures everyone the Academy still enjoys a healthy box-office narrative. These races feel less like debates than foregone conclusions, the outcome often legible months in advance. But once…
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25 in ’25 #20: “Superbad” (2007)
There are comedies that succeed because they are funny, and then there are comedies that succeed because they understand something essential about the moment in which they appear. Superbad does both—and that dual achievement is precisely why it became an instant classic. Released in the summer of 2007, Superbad didn’t creep its way into cultural memory; it detonated. Almost…
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25 in 25 #21: “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001)
The Royal Tenenbaums opens with the quiet confidence of a film that already knows exactly what it wants to be. It greets the viewer like a well-loved book—familiar, a little odd, and marked by a dry, knowing humor. From the very first moments, with the instrumental “Hey Jude” drifting over the prologue, the film establishes its…
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25 in ’25 #22: “The Holdovers” (2023)
Early in Alexander Payne’s 2023 film, The Holdovers, Paul Hunham informs his students—without a trace of consolation—that “life is like a henhouse ladder: shitty and short.” It is not merely a joke, or even a provocation, but a thesis statement: a bleak, funny distillation of the film’s worldview, in which suffering is unavoidable, dignity is hard-won,…
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“Hamnet” – My Favorite Film of The Year
There are films that touch the heart, films that bruise it—and then there are films that ask you to live with your heart open. Hamnet is that rare, soul-deep experience. Watching it, boundaries between the modern audience and the people onscreen—whose real-life counterparts walked, loved, and mourned more than four hundred years ago—soften and blur, as if…
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The Quiet Tragedy of “Train Dreams”
By the time the credits rolled, I felt as though I had watched an entire life — fragile, lonely, unrecorded — unfold and disappear. And I knew that Train Dreams, the new Netflix film based on the 2011 novella, would be one of my favorite films of the year. Not because it dazzles, but because it…
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“One Battle After Another” – A Chaotic Film for Our Time
Some films hit you like a brick on first viewing, and One Battle After Another is one of them. It’s unruly, overstuffed, and constantly accelerating, as though the movie itself is inhaling the same frantic air as the country it depicts. But when you return to it, the film settles into clarity. All that volatility—the tonal lurches,…
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25 in ’25 #23: “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022)
Top Gun: Maverick arrived in theaters in the summer of 2022 like a flare shot across a darkened sky—bright, unmistakable, and freighted with a message. After two years of shuttered multiplexes, streaming wars, and the uneasy question of whether the theatrical experience might be fading into myth, here came a film that insisted, without hesitation, that…
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