June 13-19, 2025

Hello, friends! 

The delightful and hilarious new Wes Anderson film,  The Phoenician Scheme, continues this week, and we've also got a new film from Celine Song to add to the cinematic riches: Materialists.  

Materialists is Celine Song's sophomore follow-up to her moving and beautiful feature film debut, Past Lives, which we played at the Pickford in 2023, and while the two films are very different in both narrative and tone, thematically they do speak to one another, and, together, they offer delicately nuanced and emotionally complex meditations on the messiness of love and relationships. 

Materialists follows Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker and dating guru, who has figured out, to mathematical precision, what two people will make the perfect couple, and her skill has resulted in numerous happy matches and weddings. Lucy begins to lose her confidence, however, when two key things happen: when her own dating life turns out to be less predictable than the math would seem to dictate and when one of the mathematically perfect matches she's made for two other people goes horribly wrong. 

And perhaps that's a story that sounds like the plot of any number of other films, particularly rom-coms, you've seen before, and indeed the trailer (which I think is quite misleading), makes it seem like this is nothing new. But as Roger Ebert once said, "It's not what it's about, it's how it's about it"  that makes a film unique, and it's the "how" of Celine Song's approach here that makes the film really special. She does not follow the beats we might expect in a typical rom-com -- and I'd hesitate to even call this a comedy, although it has its comedic, light moments. And unlike so many films, where we might predict the emotional tone of a scene, Song instead offers us something fresh every time: where we might expect a scene to end, she extends it and lets the emotion hang and deepen; where we might expect a cut, she extends the shot and lets new emotions play out over the characters' faces; where we might expect a tidy ending, she leaves us with a thoughtful complexity. 

 And, to be sure, Materialists is nothing if not entertaining, Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans, as the actors playing the characters caught up in a love triangle, are a true pleasure to watch, but it's a film that doesn't just offer a romantic romp: it's a film that left me thinking about it for days afterwards, meditating on the nature of love and identity, particularly as that plays out in a modern, online, capitalistic world.  

As Song noted in a recent interview, "We're not just showing up here to be in love and beautiful and get to be in a rom-com. We're also going to take this opportunity to talk about something. Because that's the power of the genre. Our favorite rom-coms are the ones where we get to start a conversation about something."  I believe Song is right -- and I can't wait to watch the film again, now that it's in its theatrical release, and to talk about it. I think you will, too. 

I'll also just quickly note our three special events this week: First, Bad Day at Black Rock was selected by Garrett, one of our wonderful Pickford volunteers, as part of our Third Eye series. Garrett writes of the film, "The film is set in late 1945 America following a one-armed veteran as he arrives by train to the nowhere town of Black Rock, CA. He arrives with questions, causing hostility and harassment from the locals. A journey of irrational fear and lies presented as a post war noir wrapped in a neo western package, all filmed in beautiful Cinemascope. Spencer Tracy leads a murderers' row of classic Hollywood actors and tough guys in this tense, thrilling and tight mystery flick."  Join us for this fabulous underseen classic of 1950's cinema on Saturday at 10 pm!  

Finally, our Drag Me to the Movies series, curated by Pickford projectionists, continues with Paris Is Burning, playing on Thursday at 11 am and 7:45 pm.  A documentary that focuses on drag queens in New York City, Paris is Burning is a document of its time, and yet it feels as joyous and as fresh in its emotion--and certainly is as moving--as it was when it was released in 1990.  Critic and author (Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema) Willow McClay writes about it, beautifully, in this way: "To watch Paris is Burning as a transgender person is completely overwhelming. It's the cinematic equivalent of someone dying of thirst suddenly having a waterfall dropped on top of them. Underneath the cracks, hidden in a back alley, on an abandoned street away from the eyes of the world, there's life, bristling and bursting with pride, beauty, vanity and love for one another. Our brothers and sisters and everyone else in between can grasp at something that's real. A reality where we can exist, and not press up against the limitations of flesh, but grab hold of a dream and christen it as us. In this building, a true safe space, where dance, music, sex and identity collide into one, we're the stars of the universe without the undue burden of a racist, sexist, transphobic society that wishes to plunge us and everyone like us back down into the earth."  

See you at the movies, friends!

Melissa