I started The Long Take as a way to stay intellectually tethered to my undergraduate training in film theory without pretending that a five-star rating or a 140-character reaction can carry the weight of sustained analysis. Letterboxd is great for logging, ranking, and venting. This space exists for slowing down: for thinking through how films actually work, and for writing at a length that allows ideas to develop rather than collapse into a quip.

Film analysis, as I understand it, is not criticism in the purely evaluative sense. Declaring a film “good” or “bad” offers a verdict, but it rarely explains how a film produces meaning or emotion. Nor is analysis simply a reflectionist exercise that treats films only as mirrors of social attitudes or historical moments.

Instead, film analysis asks how cinema functions as an art form. It breaks a film into its constituent elements and examines how those elements interact to shape narrative comprehension, emotional response, and interpretation. The goal is not to decode culture at large, but to understand how moving images and sounds are organized to create experience.

What follows includes essays, close readings, and reviews grounded in film theory and attentive analysis. I hope you enjoy these takes, question them, and develop your own. If they encourage a more deliberate and attentive way of watching, then they’ve done their job.

-Kristy