I’m a writer and hospitality/wine professional. Most of the writing I’ve done since 2018 has been on on X, Bluesky, and Letterboxd, where I post about movies and culture but also try to think out loud about living well, and particularly about how to stay human as the technological sand shifts under us. I believe you gotta be a student of human moves. I also had a video go viral once, which was fun.
I worked for years as a writer and senior editor at the film criticism site Bright Wall Dark Room. In 2018, Abrams Books published The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs, by my husband Ryan Stevenson and me. The book features two interviews with Wes Anderson, as well as talks with Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, Bryan Cranston, and interviews with all department heads; direct reporting from set; essays on film craft, style, and history, with an emphasis on mid-20th-century Japanese film. You can order the book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Abrams, or wherever you purchase books.
Ryan and I are based in Providence, Rhode Island. We watch at least half a movie every day, usually pausing it intermittently to break down what’s happening, and this is one of the chief joys of my life.
You can email me at laurenwilf (a t) gmail.com.
- Liv Ullmann, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- Guillermo del Toro, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- Interviews with Wes Anderson available in The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs
- The Advanced Cinephile’s Path
- No movie can withstand the weight of being “an important movie”
- The rewatch frees a movie to be what it is
- The rewatch that reveals you didn’t understand it before at all
- Streaming culture keeps people in “discovery mode”
- Anticipating the you on the other side of this viewing
- The “Mid Masterpiece”
- Actors who “hold it down”
- Movies as a dense network of choices to discuss
- Period pieces should alienate audiences inherently
- Period dialect and Carey Mulligan's Maestro accent
- Adapting Dune and Paul as Übermensch
- Looking for signs of falseness
- Interstellar, 10 years on
- Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 Little Women
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the art life
- Revisiting Nolan's The Prestige
- Hal Ashby's The Last Detail
- Seeing The Sound of Music on film
- The Wicker Man (1973)
- Brainstorm
- Broadcast News
- The Northman
- Hook, children's art, and The Arena
- My favorite kid scene (from Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore)
- Some movies get celebrated merely for being a good idea for a movie
- Great directors get graded on the curve of their own work
On living
- A proposal for a media fast: “Reality Day”
- The secret to happiness is liking things and finding things to like
- It’s not “writing,” it’s “writing stuff down”
- “Time-machining” to the present
- Developing intuition about things made with care
- Learning a new skill reminds you that things are knowable
- You have to be interesting to find an interesting partner
- You need to have leisurely conversations with your partner
- Don’t bargain about rest and work
- Guilt is an energy leak
- Making good habits casual and haphazard
- The virtuous procrastination cycle
- 20th century acting manuals as advice for living
- Inspiration as an intentionally cultivated state
- The payoff of cultivating taste
- There is still time for it to be a “good day”
- A happy and interesting life is possible
- Finding oneself in a place to receive something
- On going bowling
- Develop a casual interest in classical music
- Consider reading great literature early in the day
- Disentangling actual memories from media memories
- Exercise as proof to oneself that change is possible
- Writing without AI help is good for you
- Notes from John Holt's How Children Fail
- Do not give credence to thoughts about your life when you wake up weird
- You should start a links channel with your partner and spam it
- “Curiosity” and “gratitude” as clichés
- Psy-op yourself into enjoying your life
- Don’t substitute the living of your life for the watching of other people’s
- The person you see in the mirror is you at your most tense and analytical
- RBF is a treatable condition
- “What do I really want here?”
- Don't stave off curiosity to save energy; curiosity generates energy
On culture
- Young people’s closed media ecosystem and canon erosion
- Why it looks like people were having more fun in the past
- People used to have to make music in person together
- We take our most futuristic stuff for granted
- The 20th century as fixation for centuries to come
- Modern wedding culture is about getting to experience celebrity
- Contemporary morality discourages honest reflection on one’s past
- On some inherent risks of the format of therapy
On hospitality, wine, and restaurant work
- Restaurant work as a good use of a liberal arts degree
- The type of people who enjoy themselves at a good restaurant
- The end-of-meal vibe exchange
- Sommelier work is about bouba vs kiki
- Why people respect bartenders more than servers
- High level service work is about recognizing and assuaging anxiety
- The spiritual discipline of staying present in a “repetitive” job
- Wine as sensory microcosm
- You need to intentionally shape your energetic relationship to your job
- Interstellar, 10 Years On, Letterboxd (and thread on X)
- Licorice Pizza is About A Woman Embarrassing Herself, Letterboxd
- Bonnie and Clyde and Disenchanting Crime, Letterboxd
2016-2018:
- Towards a True Children’s Cinema: On My Neighbor Totoro, Bright Wall/Dark Room (featured in the My Neighbor Totoro 30th Anniversary Special Edition Blu-Ray set)
- Witch-Craft: Why Robert Eggers is Our Next Great Filmmaker, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- Reintroducing Ingmar Bergman (with Ryan Stevenson), Bright Wall/Dark Room
- Sacred Texts and Ruined Childhoods: On Aronofsky’s Noah, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- I’m a Feminist, and I Loved The Neon Demon, Gradient
- Cracking Up: On Liv Ullmann in Face to Face, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- This Mass of Conflicting Impulses: A Former Teen Narcissist Watches Margaret, Bright Wall/Dark Room
2012-16:
- First Love, Last Love: Courtship Culture and the Teen Cancer Romance, Christianity Today
- Possessed: Vertigo, through Her Eyes, Bright Wall/Dark Room
- I am Jack’s Loving Eye: Suffering and Renewal in Room, Christ and Pop Culture
- Killing the Spirit of Fear: How Female Action Heroes Can Help Women Live Courageously, Christ and Pop Culture
- Bleakness and Richness: Christopher Nolan on Human Nature, The Other Journal