Features
This is a series firmly situated in a fraught and flawed framing of the past. The core games play out against a backdrop that could easily have been lifted from a Western Civilization syllabus, and that is a foundational problem.
Years in Review
The art form is alive and healthy despite the onslaught of corporate monopolizing and the streaming dominance that made the closing of movie theaters feel even more ominous. An intrinsic truth has not changed, and likely will not: artists are out there making movies. Seek out their work.
I bought a 16mm Bolex windup camera in 1987. And that is the camera I use. Wow. Can you think of all the cameras and cell phones and computers and laptops that each one of us has had in those intervening years? And I love that. I don't have to worry about batteries.
We read it not just for the light that smart writers can throw on cinema, but for the way that cinema, like the beam of a projector, lights up the minds of smart writers.
The best Film Comment covers of the twenty-first century, in the humble opinions of the editors who chose them.
This week’s guests are filmmaker Stephen Cone and RS contributor and Fordham professor Shonni Enelow to close out the year.
The radical in everyday life in a new American docu-comedy series and a classic by Abbas Kiarostami.
It is a quiet but influential work in its depiction of blackness, of Black romance and alterity in a shifting urban landscape. The film is both elegiac and symbolic, yet precisely located in San Francisco and true to the early 2000s.
“Will haunt you after it’s over . . . makes us think about the role that food plays in our lives—both as social beings and creatures of the earth.” –Vox
Jimmie cannot lay claim to the house as he wants to, cannot stabilize and contain his feelings about his family and himself. But the greater loss is that the city has no place for Mont’s theater.
“Interact with story” encapsulates how the largest media companies see experimentation as PR gloss, which may be residue of early-net transmedia marketing campaigns.
A Few Great Pumpkins
Every Halloween, we present a week’s worth of perfect holiday programming. This year's lineup: Pulse, Host, Brain Damage, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Velvet Vampire, Deathdream, and The Devil and Daniel Webster.
The American Gothic, particularly as practiced by literary forebears Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving, who clearly shaped Eggers’s vision, tends to orbit around concepts of evil, madness, and the supernatural. But ultimately no monster ever compares to humans driven by fear.
The drive-in is inextricable from the history of censorship in big-budget American cinema, and is also inextricable from the history of the automobile in the U.S., which is in turn inextricable from the history of suburbanization.