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1 month ago | 
letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Drew Gregory |Jessica Yeung
After all these years, Alice Wu remains astonished at the reach of her debut feature, Saving Face. “Usually, I imagine that the people who saw the movie are just, like, me and my friends, my friends’ girlfriends, maybe their ex-girlfriends and then a few random straight people,” the writer-director says with a laugh.
Way more than a few random straight people have seen Saving Face.
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2 months ago | 
letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Robert Daniels
Maybe you’ve seen it: that black-and-white footage of Black boys leaping between apartment buildings, soaring across the Los Angeles sky. Charles Burnett captured these low-shot acrobatics on 16mm for his UCLA master’s thesis film, 1978’s Killer of Sheep,which he wrote, directed, shot and edited himself.
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas
When you first crossed the threshold from reality into cyberspace, who was waiting to greet you? Did those figures imagine themselves as digital pioneers, or did they aspire to dwell in some self-possessed elsewhere, beyond the omniscient gaze and flimsy promises of immortality the internet dangles before us?
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Danielle Scruggs |Katie Rife |Aidan M. Un
In their more commercial iterations, film festivals can feel like a marketplace where people buzz around buying, selling and witnessing the day’s cinematic wares. At their best, festivals can feel like a watering hole, a natural gathering space where the body is nourished, where novel interactions can occur, where this mutually craved life-giving thing (trade cinema for water) can be collectively enjoyed.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Annie Lyons
Rikers. Alcatraz. Devil’s Island. Sing Sing.
These are infamous carceral spaces with names that can instantly arouse a feeling of fear in a listening ear. Fear of incarcerated people and their ostensible legal transgressions, fear of confined space, stolen time and distance from a material reality spurred by selective intimacy and self-control.
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Gemma Gracewood |Adesola Thomas
“I don’t think one time in seven years have we picked the same film.” Elric Kane is reflecting on the 2,000-odd movies he and his Pure Cinema Pod co-host Brian Saur have recommended to each other, and to listeners, since they started podcasting together in 2017.
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Jul 1, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Ella Kemp |Janet Planet
If you were often outdoors as a child in the summers, you likely remember a series of keen sensations: having your palms licked by blades of grass, the soft scrape of tree bark against flesh, sinking fingers into soil. Memories of aimless warm days in July might conjure a sense of unblemished bliss. But in Janet Planet, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s 1991-set debut feature film, these lilting moments are complicated with one child’s formative, tender bummer summer.
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May 11, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Shayna Maci Warner |Mitchell Beaupre |Serial Mom
“Is this the cocksucker residence? Isn’t this 4251 Pussy Way?” Murderous suburbanite mother Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) grunts through these scandalizing inquiries during a targeted prank call to a despised neighbor in Serial Mom(1994), one of writer-director John Waters’ classic crime comedies.
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Mar 8, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Kambole Campbell |Big Picture
Ava DuVernay is practiced in carefully adapting the lived experiences of Black figures across narrative film, documentary and television. She’s captured SCLC and SNCC leaders organizing alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, the Central Park Five’s prosecution in When They See Us, and the reflections of activists and prison abolitionists like Angela Davis in 13th, DuVernay’s documentary about the transmutation of racialized chattel slavery to codified mass incarceration.
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Jan 16, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Katie Rife |Sasquatch Sunset
With 2023 in the rearview (have you perused our Year in Review yet?), the first pages are turned on a fresh calendar: twelve months of enticing new features for us to open our hearts and souls to. The frigid air of Park City, Utah is never more inviting than in late January, when the independent-forward Sundance Film Festival rolls into town. The Letterboxd mic will be on the ground, so if you’re also there keep an eye out for us in a chilly queue, an early morning bistro or late-night club.
