Bright Wall/Dark Room

Bright Wall/Dark Room provides a fresh perspective on cinema: no sensational opinions, no buzz, no film industry updates, no misleading headlines, no "content," and no advertisements. Our online magazine focuses on the connection between films and the experience of being human. We serve as a community for writers and readers who share a deep love for cinema. Think of us as your favorite local video rental shop, where staff would happily engage in long discussions about familiar films and suggest hidden gems you might not know. We feature contributions from filmmakers, film enthusiasts, and students of film studies, as well as from comedians, novelists, painters, and poets.

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Superbad: Looking Bad

2 weeks ago | brightwalldarkroom.com | Katherine Connell

Three teenage boys sit on a public bus. They’re bored, dead-eyed, and awkward in stature. In a couple of weeks, high school graduation will unfurl the summer before college begins: liminal dog days spotted by dorm room shopping and parties they’re never invited to.
Bram Stoker's Dracula (with Angelica Jade Bastién)

2 weeks ago | brightwalldarkroom.com | Veronica Fitzpatrick |Chad Perman

https://anchor.fm/s/e854cc28/podcast/play/101083745/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-3-9%2F8974930b-3cf3-9d85-e712-8f99eb14ed9b.mp3This month we sit down with Vulture critic Angelica Jade Bastién, author of the newsletter Madwomen & Muses, where she recently started writing about “Movies That Fuck.” In honor of “cinematic sensuality,” we chat about Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Francis Ford Coppola’s ode to ahistorical melodrama and doomed romance.
Fashion & Assimilation in Hester Street (1975)

1 month ago | brightwalldarkroom.com | Emily Tamkin

Look on me. Give a look on me. Am I a Jew or a gentile?”Jake, formerly Yankel (Steven Keats), asks this while standing proudly in a park. He’s posing the question to his wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), and Mr. Bernstein (Mel Howard), who lodges with them in their New York City tenement. Jake asks his question—does he look like a Jew or a gentile—while the three are out for a day of picnicking and playing with Jake and Gitl’s son, whom Jake calls Joey and Gitl calls Yossele.
Episode #59: The Celebration (1998)

1 month ago | brightwalldarkroom.com | Veronica Fitzpatrick |Chad Perman

https://anchor.fm/s/e854cc28/podcast/play/100203938/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-2-21%2Fc8e1eeeb-05ce-87ad-d946-ed0c0a5335b9.mp3On this month’s bite-sized episode, we zoom in on the spectral perspective of Thomas Vinterburg’s debut film, The Celebration (1998).
There’s No Humor Anymore & All the Glamour’s Dead

1 month ago | brightwalldarkroom.com | Lindsey Romain

The screen fades to a still image of a woman draped in butter-yellow fabric, accordion sleeves spread like wings, superimposed over black-and-white photographs of an audience. She’s on a stage that we don’t see; the impression is one of transmutability. Stage actors, real ones, shred the mirage of separate spaces. There is no stage and audience, just communion of story and spirit. Disappearance is an act of transcendence for the most admired and adroit performers.
In Dreams: An Interview With Jonathan Rosenbaum

1 month ago | brightwalldarkroom.com | Frank Falisi

In Freehold, New Jersey, movies were the things that played at the local Loews. A multiplex childhood means memories by mass culture: the first movie I ever saw was The Lion King (1994). I remember its shapes most, behemoth blobs and lion-like impressions. The songs were louder than anything I’d ever heard. My first PG-13 movie was Small Soldiers (1998). I drank a caffeinated soda as big as my face and stayed awake all night. I thought I’d never sleep again.
Good One (2024): Into the Woods

1 month ago | brightwalldarkroom.com | Chase Hutchinson

Faced with a world that remains in constant and accelerating decay, it’s darkly humorous that a common rejoinder to expressions of despair has been the directive to go “touch grass.” Managing to be both healing yet woefully insufficient to resolving the ills of the world that await us when we return, this exercise in communing with the natural world is an escape as much as it is a gasp for salvation.
Episode #58: A Different Man (with Frank Falisi)

2 months ago | brightwalldarkroom.com | Veronica Fitzpatrick |Chad Perman

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Red Rooms (2023): Seeing Is

Jan 24, 2025 | brightwalldarkroom.com | Fran Hoepfner

Where my aversion to the horror genre began is difficult to place: mostly it comes down to the notion that I don’t want to have to see something I don’t want to see. That’s most of what’s horrible, isn’t it? Seeing—or thinking you’re seeing. Don’t show me, just tell me. I’ll be fine that way. One might assume this stems from a past marked with violence, where seeing once showed something unforgettable (derogatory). I have no such instance upon which to call from memory.
Pilgrim’s Progress

Jan 21, 2025 | brightwalldarkroom.com | Joel Mayward

St. Augustine’s Confessions presents us with a man in crisis seeking The Good Life. Arguably the first autobiography in Western culture, Confessions—written between AD 397 and 400—chronicles Augustine’s spiritual and existential journey from being a horny young man wracked with guilt to a horny middle-aged man wracked with guilt but saved by God’s grace.