Never Cursed is a weekly Substack about movies & the people who make them. Every month, I post longform film essays, screening recommendations, and a monthly culture diary. Click Here To Subscribe
In Defense of Romance: Sex, Love, & Babygirl
For all the chatter about the return of sex to American movie theaters last year, from Challengers’ athletic throuple-ing to Nosferatu’s supernatural bodice-ripping, what surprised & inspired me most in 2024 was the return of genuine cinematic romance. My three favorite films of the year – La Chimera, Queer, and Babygirl – all explored romance in singular and unexpected ways, from Luca Guadagnino & Daniel Craig’s reinvention of William Bourroughs into the world’s saddest lovelorn clown to Alice Rohrwacher’s textured exploration of love, loss, and the objects we leave behind. And while I’ve written about how seeing Queer and La Chimera in theaters were two landmark moviegoing experiences for me, it was weirdly Halina Reijn’s prickly thriller Babygirl that felt the most comforting to me, an answer to a problem that had been nagging at me all year: What happened to the romantic thriller? …
In Alice Rohrwacher’s Latest, A Brush With The Sublime
Leaving the theater after seeing La Chimera, I felt like turned-over earth, the darkest, stillest parts of me freshly exposed to the elements. Rohrwacher’s films always stir this feeling in me – like I’ve had a brush with something sublime and unnamable, buried deeper than I usually dare to look. I looked down at my hands half-expecting to find Etruscan dirt under my fingernails, momentarily dislocated in time and place…
You don’t watch La Chimera, you encounter it: twisting and unfurling elusively like a living thing, beautiful to observe, until - suddenly - it looks straight at you, naming a long-buried piece of your heart…
Phantom Thread & The Romance Of The Rewatch
Phantom Thread is, in many ways, the perfect Valentine’s Day rewatch. I find it to be hopelessly romantic, delivering the kind of twisted love story that every obsessive artist secretly hopes for – patience, understanding, collaboration, and a much-needed (if traumatically-enforced) day off. I watch this movie a few times a year, and no matter what I’m searching for – New Year’s Day hangover cure, writers-block-breaking inspiration, palette reference for a manic apartment painting project, etc. – it never fails to unveil new secrets. It’s an incredibly generous movie in this way, always receptive to whatever new patina my current mood or focus lends it…
"I Saw It Happen!" : POV and Provocation in Irvin Kershner’s Should-Be Classic.
Under the yoke of a mid-June heatwave, New York robs me of the desire to choose. I order whichever little iced drink will come out the fastest, see whichever film is playing at the closest theater, agree to whichever plan is guaranteed to be air-conditioned. I disassociate on a date in a humid thunderstorm and end up riding the subway in the wrong direction from home, happy to let the city choose the course of my night in exchange for a couple extra minutes in an ice-cold railcar. By the fourth day over 90 degrees I am hermetically sealed in my apartment and glued to my phone, a voyeur to an algorithm-guided stream of images alternating between unchecked violence and studied self-promotion.
Irvin Kershner’s iconic New York giallo-noir Eyes of Laura Mars(1978) hums with the same feverish, out-of-body passivity...
Wrestling with the Power of Denis Villeneuve's Would-Be Anti-Colonialist Epic
Dune: Part Two makes full use of cinema’s immersive capabilities, to an almost overwhelming degree. It is thrilling, and moving, and ambitiously inventive in a way that we rarely see now — exactly the type of film I hoped for as a child in love with the world-expanding immersiveness of sci fi and fantasy. But that immersive potential, the thing that makes me love filmmaking so much that I’ve devoted my life to it, is what makes me fear its political misuse — or, in this case, disuse — above all else…
In Luca Guadagnino’s Sexiest Film, Beauty is Only Skin Deep
My favorite Luca Guadagnino film, 2015’s psychosexual thriller A Bigger Splash, is the messy European answer to the cold, American beauty of his recent courtside hit, Challengers. Sweat, obsession, and deception drive both films, but the sweat ladled onto A Bigger Splash’s beautiful cast is a byproduct of languishing poolside, rather than the result of the punishing American work ethic that drives Challengers. Bodies are beautiful, but bellies and thighs are allowed to be soft; magnetism comes from someplace other than perfection. Success affords adults the ability to behave like entitled children, inuring them from the desire for anything beyond the buffet of sex laid at their feet. The mountain of ambition has been scaled, and we’re invited to indulge in the view from the top before it all comes tumbling down…
Our Last Summer: On Afire, My Favorite Film of 2023 ❤️🔥
Petzold is one of my favorite directors, balancing cinematic style, emotionally rich romance, and carefully considered moral/political themes across a variety of tones and genres. He is a magician of endings – his final acts are always surprising and precisely constructed, no matter what genre he’s working in. In Afire, he delivers one of the most satisfying movie endings I can remember, deliberately allowing us to paddle around in Leon’s shallow world view until the very end when both Leon and the audience are suddenly thrown into the deep end…