“The type of person who goes to see four movies a week alone is a broken person. Any medium that allows someone to spend monastic amounts of time by him- or herself, wandering the gloaming of imagination and reality, is doomed to be adored by lost, lonely people.”

I qualify as broken, lost, and lonely by this definition, and yet I’m not at all discouraged. Though you may have to be a bit off to spend as much time watching and analyzing movies as I do, the fact that film criticism isn’t actually so solitary an avocation is heartening — it connects you to people in ways you wouldn’t expect.

In my past life I both worked at and wrote for outlets like IndieWire, LA Weekly, and the Village Voice (RIP), with freelance bylines everywhere from Vice to the LA Times. Then I decided that, however much I enjoyed this work (which was a lot!), building my life around it was maybe not the best long-term decision — I’d seen too many outlets close, too many colleagues laid off, and felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But still. Writing about movies is what I do, and the occasional freelance gig was no longer satisfying that urge — especially since COVID-19 led to most outlets freezing their freelance budgets. No gods, no masters, as they say, and so I decided to start this newsletter and shout into the void. Feel free to shout back.