• Are We the Baddies? Ecological Catastrophe, Complicity and 2019 at the Movies By Mark Asch
• Sorry, We’re All We’ve Got: The Limits of Community in 2019’s Best Movies By Tim Grierson
• The Regretful Viewer: Memory and Anxiety at the Multiplex By Beatrice Loayza
• Commodity Fetishism By Graham Fuller
• Disposessions By Paul Dallas
• Dressing for Business: Costume Designer Mitchell Travers on the Sharp Period Style of Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers By Abbey Bender
• Start Your Engines: The Sound Team of James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari on the Thrill of the Race By Scott Macaulay
• Memory Play: Producer Designer Barbara Ling on Conjuring Quentin Tarantino’s Period LA in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood By Matt Mulcahey

• The Parasite Eight-Minute Meal

  Bong Joon-ho’s class warfare thriller Parasite has already entered the food film canon, and its signature entrée sits in the dead center of the highbrow-lowbrow matrix. Jjapaguri (translated as “ram-don” in the subtitles) is a mashed-up concoction of two different types of instant noodles: jjapaghetti (an abridged version of the Chinese-Korean black bean noodle dish, jjajangmyun) and Neoguri (a brand of packaged spicy seafood udon). The dish is prepared in just under eight minutes in Parasite, as the wealthy Park matriarch, on the way home from a cancelled family camping trip, calls in an order to her new housekeeper. Against […]

  By Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
• Economy of the Arcane: Pedro Costa on Vitalina Varela

  Pedro Costa will not separate films from how they are made. We cannot escape that “how” from what we are seeing on screen, so we must make films the hard way. It is not enough for us to get them made: We must know our technicians closely, see that they are compensated fairly, ensure that our project is optimized for our tools and that those tools only operate at their zenith. Ease, Costa warns, is the sure sign of a “trap,” that, if succumbed to, will expose one’s work to “bullshit,” a word he does not use lightly. If we […]

  By Aaron Hunt
• Digital Wanderlust: On Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World

  Two major anniversaries in digital technology happened in 2019. October 29th marked the fiftieth year since the first message was transmitted via ARPANET, an early network of computers developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and hosted at universities including UCLA and Stanford (where the message was, respectively, sent and received)—a relatively pat and mutually agreed upon milestone for the beginning of the internet as we know it. The other anniversary—the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web—is much less decisive: You might notice people celebrating the thirtieth year of the internet’s most transformative application well into 2021. A quick […]

  By Joanne McNeil

Also: Sonic Menace: Composer Mark Korven on Scoring Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse Photographing Memory: DP Rodrigo Prieto on the “Three-Headed Monster” Used to Shoot Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman Where Do I Go From Here? Southern Subjects When the Streaming’s Over The Inner Reaches Out of Space Editor’s Letter