Daniel Carlson

‘Saw’ (released 20 years ago this week) launched a franchise, a genre, and several careers. It’s also endearingly bad. 

The land has looked this way for ten thousand years. Rocks and dirt that have never known roads; skies that have never been pricked by telephone poles. There aren’t even remnants of things that used to be. Nothing but the wilderness of pines and elk…

I think my mom died a year ago today. I say “think” because the last full day she lived was Tuesday, September 15, 2020. Sometime that night, she died. When we realized what had happened, we called the hospice organization that had been providing…

(Originally published June 2015) "If you're going to reckon with the past, you might as well reckon with all of it." That's what I said to an old friend as we sat in the living room of a house that ten of us had rented for the weekend. It was a…

Cormac McCarthy hasn’t published a novel in 16 years. That’s not to say he should be publishing them now—he’s had a career as one of the most influential and celebrated voices in American fiction, he’s won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award,…

January is usually a happy time for the movie community: the start of a new year means it’s time for the next installment of the Sundance Film Festival, which takes place each winter in Park City, Utah, and showcases features and documentaries from…

There’s a parallel universe where Goon is exactly the kind of by-the-book movie you would expect it to be: an eager young guy joins a hockey team, makes friends with some teammates while also winning over some reluctant older players, finds love with…

“Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? … Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is…

Ordinary People shouldn’t work. Not as a movie, anyway. The 1976 novel by Judith Guest deals with the nature and perception of grief, exploring in intricate ways how a major loss can affect a family—in this case, the Jarretts: father Calvin, mother…

There’s a parallel universe where Goon is exactly the kind of by-the-book movie you would expect it to be: an eager young guy joins a hockey team, makes friends with some teammates while also winning over some reluctant older players, finds love with…

Note: This essay discusses films that reference Native American people and culture in ways that were common in American society at the time but which were as wrong and insensitive then as they are today. “I always liked to hear about the old timers.…

It’s too early in Destin Daniel Cretton’s career to call Short Term 12 his best film, though it’s easy to believe that it will always be his truest, purest, and most sincere. ... Watch Free Now ► More About 'Short Term 12' Add to Watchlist Remove…

One hundred and six years ago, more than 100,000 people died fighting in the dirt on a narrow strip of land almost entirely surrounded by ocean. This was the Gallipoli campaign of World War I, and the fact that this figure pales next to the truly…

Throughout Brian De Palma’s 2002 film Femme Fatale, you’ll see a poster in the background for a movie called Deja Vue [sic]. It appears next to sidewalks and on those big wrap-around ad spaces near bus stops and public thoroughfares. It even shows up…

One year and ten days after Layer Cake opened in theaters, a press conference was held in London (where the film is set) by Eon Productions, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and MGM to announce that Daniel Craig, star of Layer Cake, had been cast as the…

There’s something nagging and incomplete about Francois Truffaut’s observation that “every film about war ends up being pro-war.” It’s not that the master filmmaker’s observation of violence’s inherent ability to enthrall is wrong; it’s more that it…

There are two Richard Linklaters. There’s the Linklater who directs the kind of mainstream movies that call to mind summer afternoons spent idly wandering through the stacks at Blockbuster, letting your eyes sweep over the boxes, hoping to find…

1. So, we’ll start with the fact that all movies are make-believe. It’s a bunch of actors on a set, wearing costumes and standing with props picked out by hordes of people you’ll never see, under the guidance of a director, saying things that have…

District 9 is not a subtle movie. It’s a sci-fi movie about prejudice and racism that’s set in Johannesburg and includes dialogue like a human saying “I love watching you [aliens] die”; in terms of nuance, this lands it somewhere around a Very…

“I’m too nostalgic, I’ll admit it.” “We graduated four months ago. What can you possibly be nostalgic for?” “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now. I…