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Coming of Age, or, the Inversion of Expectations in The Last Picture Show

Life is not a stroll across a field – Boris Pasternak Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) reveals, in a poignant and compassionate tenor, the evolution of youthful expectations as they are molded, corrupted, and realigned by the passage of time. When youthful ambitions are seen through the prism of adulthood they refract strange […]

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Badlands and the Taxonomy of Escape

“The world was like a faraway planet to which I could never return” – ​Holly, Badlands Terrence Malick’s directorial debut ​Badlands (1973)​ is in many respects a tale of escapism writ large over a collection of isolated interior and exterior landscapes. Our protagonists seek to construct their own mythologies and rewrite their own histories, with […]