Set and setting are as important to a film experience as to psychedelic experience. When I saw Interstellar in 2014, I’d coincidently just visited the M. C. Escher museum in The Hague and been reading a lot of Borges (see: “The Library of Babel” in Labyrinths which is up there on Murphy’s bookshelf.) The film was a thrilling thought experiment.

My second experience with Interstellar was at a different point in spacetime: 2023 in Iceland with my daughter after spending…

I’m agnostic about the Dune books, having never read them, and indeed all SciFi. So I arrived neither overexcited nor vulnerable to betrayal. I can honestly say it was the best pure science fiction movie I’ve seen since the original Star Wars trilogy. I’d compare it to the pleasurable foreplay I experienced seeing The Fellowship of the Ring when it came out.

Villeneuve seems to have mined Herbert’s Dune and extracted its unadulterated mythic essence. It does exactly what myth…

Cruise and company seemed to have turned to T. S. Eliot for inspiration on how the world of Mission Impossible should end: not with a bang but a whimper, a feel-good whimper.

Once we’re past first act longueurs and unnecessary messianic ratcheting, the clever Aleutian callback to De Palma’s M:I is a lot of fun, and the two impossibly spectacular set pieces — the silent submarine deep dive and the analog wing-walking — are well worth the price of ission…

What could have been a fairly standard police procedural—crooked cop, dead dealers, bad decisions—has been Herzogified. The film opens at the crossroads of two of the great fuckups in 21st Century America: Hurricane Katrina and the Opioid Crisis. Herzog has always sought out landscapes of collapse—jungles, tundras, the human psyche. Herzog understands how weird New Orleans is at the metabolism level and Post-Katrina NOLA is perfect for him: not the postcard city of Anne Rice cemeteries and smoky jazz, but…

About 40 minutes into Psycho, Norman removes a print hanging on his wall of “Susannah and the Elders,” a story from the Book of Daniel of two men spying on a naked bathing woman. Norman then spies through a peephole at Marion undressing to bathe. There’s an extreme close-up of his eye in the darkness lit by a beam of light from the peephole. Here we have the ultimate metaphor for moviegoing, the audience-as-voyeur, sitting in the dark spying on…

This is the most complex relationship between two leads in an Hitchcock picture: spy and handler, misconceptions and magnatisms, delusions of morally superiority, manipulations and guilt, jealousies hidden and barbed.

Cary Grant is a basically saying to Ingrid: please sleep with Claude Rains so you can spy on him for us. If you do I promise to love you. She’s saying to him: if you love me you'll tell me not to do it. Grant finds himself falling in love…