The essays desk
The essays desk
The full run, newest first. Reviews carry a run of ornaments — one to five — beside the kicker; essays and dossiers do not, because you cannot rate an argument out of five. Read the marks for a shape, then read the piece for the reason.
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Review
Nightwater, and the City That Refuses to Dry
There is a shot forty minutes into Nightwater that I have not stopped thinking about. A detective stands at the mouth of an underpass while the rain comes down in sheets behind her, and Kessler holds the frame long enough that the...
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Review
The Long Wet Season Asks for Three Hours and Earns Them
Two hundred and eleven minutes. I write the number first because it is the first thing anyone will ask about, and the last thing that matters. The Long Wet Season runs three and a half hours, most of it spent watching a...
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Essay
The Sodium Hour: On the Orange Light We Are Losing
There is a color that noir was built on and it is disappearing from the world. It is the specific amber-orange of low-pressure sodium streetlight — the glow that turned every wet road into a river of copper and drained every face...
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Essay
A Grammar of Downpour: How Rain Is Built in Post
Here is a thing that took me too long to understand: the rain you hear in a noir is almost never the rain that fell during the shoot. Production rain is a logistical nightmare and an acoustic mess — it drowns dialogue,...
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Review
Precinct of Rain Has the Look and Misplaces the Reason
Precinct of Rain is a beautiful film that does not know what it is sad about, and after two viewings I am confident that is a fatal condition rather than a mysterious one. Vaugine has clearly studied the canon. Every surface is...
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