Jessa Crispin reflects on the 2021 Philadelphia Film Festival.

maybe, as the world collapses around us, we are haunted by an unconscious sense that maybe we have too much, maybe we are taking up too much space, maybe we are mostly takers and the only thing we really contribute is an endless stream of microplastics into our waterways.

It was a time of mass shootings, Paris Hilton, boys playing games that looked like war on their consoles and soldiers waging war that looked like video games from drone centers.

How do we know something really happened unless it is recreated and simplified dramatically by a diverse ensemble cast, headed by Jeff Daniels, and captured on blue tinted film?

Sofia Coppola doesn't seem to work so much with “the female gaze,” whatever that might mean. She doesn't watch women so much as she watches men watching women.

Every time a new technology is invented our first thought is, how can I use this to get off? Our second: how can we use this to talk to the dead?

We're casting about, looking for anything that could possibly make the world even slightly less terrible. It's not even that strange that our conversation about films is much louder and emotional than, say, immigration reform or tax policy or Wall Street regulation.

What does it mean to identify with these characters? To find their struggles the same as my own?

Frédéric sees the desk where his mother, now passed, did her business, shoved unopened mail, searched for a pen, locked away in a glass case. “Doesn't it seem caged?”