The Super-8 camera is light like a feather. In order to employ it well, the filmmaker should be light as a feather. To watch a…
In 1968, Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol. A vociferous feminist and author of the “S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, Solanas felt that Warhol…
In an introduction for Bill Morrison’s new film darker, Nitrate Picture Show festival director Peter Bagrov joked that when archivists and preservationists come across reels…
The 10th Nitrate Picture Show, programmed by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, is predicated on a technology both out-of-date and incendiary: the…
After years spent acting in Mumblecore staples like Gabi on the Roof in July, experimental oddities like Hellaware, and horror anthologies like V/H/S, Sophia Takal…
In the decades during Bush’s Global War on Terror that became Obama’s, then Trump’s, then Biden’s, there was a sense of resistance that permeated among…
Several of Kalil Haddad’s films begin with a school picture. An adolescent boy poses for the camera, his hair neatly brushed, his shirt clean, a…
The mid-to-late ’90s into the early 2000s felt like a boom period for scrappy, singular, and DIY indie queer cinema. From Go Fish to Watermelon…
For over a decade, many cinephiles’ one touchpoint for the high watermark in martial arts cinema has been The Raid. It’s for good reason. Gareth…
The godfather of punk cinema, Jon Moritsugu, unleashes his vision of the contemporary art world in his seventh feature film, Numbskull Revolution (2026), which relates…
Before you lies a choice, a selection of fates. In one possibility, you are Tsarina of all the Russias, you are caparisoned in gemstones, wrapped…
Film festivals can feel like these nebulous, sometimes exploitative, labyrinthine constructs. At their best, however, they should hopefully be a place to foster creation and…
In his 2020 dark comedy Dinner in America, director Adam Carter Rehmeier captured the stifling stagnancy of life in suburban America and the simmering urge…
Allow me to posit a cinephilic contention: that cinema is perhaps the most formally complete of all art forms — or rather, a blistering confection…
In 2021, the Tolkien barrel was finally empty — it was less than empty. Christopher Tolkien, hitherto guardian of his father’s legacy, had died the…
I observe a Dry January most years. Usually, I drink to a moderate level, and prefer alcohol as a sedative rather than as a party…
A woman gazes out a window before heading to an event to receive an award. As the pleasantries die down, her smile fades, and she…
Renoir went relatively unnoticed when it premiered in competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, its squat, youthful perspective perhaps lost amid the crowd of…
A commonly held belief about Chinese documentary cinema is that, prior to the 1990s and the “New Documentary Movement,” the work of their filmmakers consisted…
“His parents were already in bed and asleep, the clock on the wall struck its uniform beat, the wind whistled by the rattling windows; the…
A ghost story doesn’t always have to manifest in slamming doors and falling objects. A possession might not send your body writhing in manic contortions…