Unearthing Mansa Musa

The Australian High Court doesn’t need an interior at all, only an internal façade, because the power which that court embodies – far from being impregnable – is akin to that of Santa Claus...

The blood would be Bosco’s chocolate syrup and the guts would be ham, donated from a local butcher shop....

“Aging for me is not a condition, but a subject,” said Agnès Varda in her Norton Lectures at Harvard University in February 2018, shortly before her 90th birthday...

In the coastal villages of southern Kent, the breeze off the water is said to cause things to age quickly: iron to rust, brass to discolor, lichen to cover roofs like the scales of a lizard...

Atomic Garden, an experimental film by Ana Vaz, opens with a purely textual prologue: Aoki Sadako, an elderly Japanese woman, visits her flower garden...

The first image in Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela is an empty street at night, from which a few headstones marking a cemetery are visible.

More than once, my maternal grandmother went to a Seattle fire station for aid, certain she was having a heart attack.

Thanks to Instagram and all its metastasized relations, nowhere is so far off the beaten path we can’t experience it visually...

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is set during the peak of the AIDS crisis, and is full of deep-cut references to 1990s pop culture.

For the past decade, A.S. Hamrah has been the sharp-tongued, rain-lashed drifter of American movie criticism.

What does an anti-colonial building look like? In Naeem Mohaiemen’s 2017 film Two Meetings and a Funeral, Vijay Prashad stands in the centre of La Coupole d’Alger in the suburbs of Algiers...

Hereditary is really about the power of art-making, and the movie’s artists are all female. Their artwork is craft-based, works that have long been associated with female labor...

The distinction between the “logic of the once-and-for-all” and the “logic of Einmal ist keinmal” points to the larger, definitional distinction between the tragic and comic genres.

On the shores of Midway Island, the juvenile albatross skeletons encircle a stomach’s worth of plastic shards, pen caps, bottle tops, the insidious end to all species’ endocrine systems innocuously named “nurdles.”

Deadpan, unhurried, and sensitive, Aki Kaurismäki’s 2017 film The Other Side of Hope tells the story of a young Syrian immigrant, Khaled.

We were waiting for a film like Black Panther, but Black Panther is not the film we were waiting for.  The first sign of ambiguity is the fact that the movie was enthusiastically received all across the political spectrum...

“Getting lost” in a work of fiction is a conventional expression that speaks to the immersive power of narrative...

One of the most peculiar qualities of Greta Gerwig’s much-acclaimed film Lady Bird is that—especially for a coming-of-age story, or domestic drama, or whatever you call it...

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop.