“What kind of a filmmaker would this actor, both gentle-hearted and fiery, have made?” – Stephanie Zacharek on Anton Yelchin

Mia Wasikowska, Anton Yelchin, in Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive”

I often look to Stephanie Zacharek to hear her take on things. Get her perspective. I’ve been reading her since her days as a music journalist for Boston’s alternative paper The Boston Phoenix. We’re talking a million years ago. And I’ve followed her wherever she went. To Salon. To the Village Voice. To her exciting nomination as 2015 Pulitzer Finalist. And now to Time, where she is the chief critic. Sometimes she puts something I’m feeling, a sense, an essence, something difficult to talk about or describe, so perfectly into words that from that moment on her words are how I think of/get a handle on whatever it is. And beyond all of that, and perhaps most importantly: it’s the writing itself that is the true appeal. It’s elegant and yet personal. You can feel her behind the words. It’s beautiful prose but not distant or omniscient in any way.

Her mournful tribute to young Anton Yelchin, killed this past weekend by his own car in his own driveway, is a perfect example.