Originally published on The Solute Listen: Eraserhead has come unstuck in time. It’s autumn, 2012. I’m lying on a bed in a dorm room in Tennessee across from my roommate’s life-sized poster of himself. …

Originally published on The Solute Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is the kind of great movie that’s often overlooked because it seems so easy: a simple feel-good story, well-told, but not all that different outwardly from the millions of other buddy movies and road movies and holiday movies that follow the…

Content note: This article contains references to sexual assault, including of minors, and incest Originally published on The Solute I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude the summer I graduated high school, which I think we can all agree is the perfect time to read it. I had discovered…

Originally published on The Solute Part One Metropolis continues Die Niebelungen’s temporal mishmash, but what was merely confusing in Niebelungen becomes an essential part of Metropolis’s power. Most science fiction builds the future on the foundation of the present — Metropolis is, if not unique, then close to it in…

Originally published on The Solute Fritz Lang was an incredibly versatile filmmaker, but he spent much of his career in both Berlin and Hollywood finding striking images in relatively modest crime dramas — the Dr. Mabuse series, Spies, M, Fury, The Big Heat. Metropolis, his greatest and, by a large…

Originally published on The Solute Part 1 This should give you an idea of how fascinating Speedy is as a document of New York (and sometimes LA) in the Roaring ’20s. There’s even a cameo from Lou Gehrig just because he happened to be hanging around Yankee Stadium during filming…

Originally published on The Solute It’s not an easy time to find a laugh at the movie theaters. …

Originally published on The Solute How do you describe Wovenhand? When I downloaded them to my iTunes from my dad’s CD library, I made sure to amend their genre description from “alternative” to “bluegrass goth-rock,” (which got me blank stares whenever I tried to describe them in those terms). I’ve…

Originally published on The Solute Original article Addendum Part 1 Addendum Part 2 That time a comics legend drove Batman straight off the rails