unfolds delicately but fastidiously - as sensitive a working-through of male violence as i think is possible in art, for how it affords unconditional and boundless empathy without striving toward a mawkish expansion of interiority. proffers neither excuses nor apologies, and doesn't peddle in forgiveness as much as in the fundamental value of life. carceral tendrils are the limbs of death as it permeates into the lowest strata of society, whose conditions of manufactured and enforced violence are the architecture…

What makes Lynch so fascinating is that he’s a conservative whose aesthetic tendencies (unerring empathy for/centering of his female characters, a proclivity for exploring dysphoric relationships between persons and their bodies/bodies and the world, and an affinity for the cynical epistemology of the noir) constantly undermine his nostalgic and otherwise regressive gestures. Nowhere is that more apparent than in The Return, a colossal moral reckoning with the willful failure of each and every available institution (cultural/political/social) to reckon with trauma.…

on the violent impositions of movie-making, the mere force of a video camera's gaze enough to draw out a hidden evil in the placidity of an essentially anonymous landscape. baffled that anyone could watch this and demand less talking, less arguing, because honestly there's nothing more purely dread-inducing here than the pointless circumambulations that people engage in when they're terrified and have no fucking clue what they're doing. the terror is built with negative space, visually and narratively, the absences…