Lamenting the Obsolescence of the DVD and Its Distinctive Viewing Practices

Thinking a lot about precarity and magic in '80s American movies lately. Rewatched this scene from The Karate Kid (1984) late last night because I was this boy and because I loved him for so many years.

10 PM, Chez Jay. I order two beers for us and a glass of wine for Mona. She’s teaching Middlemarch for the first time on Monday, and though I wrote about it for my undergraduate thesis I remember it very poorly.

DamNation undoubtedly falls within your category of “contemporary environmentalist pop docs flooding Netflix, with their smooth animated graphics emulating hand drawings, and their nature-porn photography, and their Sufjanian soundtracks.”

American Aristocracy, Triangle Film Corporation, 1916 by Heather Lang The other world is ours, yours and mine, this hazy kingdom of silent film and forgotten Polaroids. – Gregory Robinson The quiet associations between silent movies and prose poems within Gregory Robinson’s unique book, All Movies Love the Moon, are...

Gnomish Agnès Varda, with her mushroom cap of hair dyed the color of a dark, ripe cherry, with her visual groaners—she operates in the spirit of happenstance, fearless of mockery.

The screenwriter and director Bruce Robinson, best known for The Killing Fields and Withnail & I, really went to town on the Freudian view of High-Rise in his little-known 1979 script, which he subtitled An Analogy.

Where No Place for Fools leaves no room for fools, it pries open the space for the fool’s room, his contemporary cell: the camera.

To begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins of a Meal (1978) by turning the camera on himself.

Wes Craven’s movies were about movies, even when they weren’t. And in this sense they helped bring cinema back to its self-reflective origins.

Around that same time I think I read the whole Ladies Almanack in my studio, across the hall from Daviel. I asked her to let me know if she wanted to make that film. She told me the whole wish: the dream of Cixous, and Myles narrating; everything.

And what clouds! Xu’s slow, tender pan renders them scarlet-tinged, streaked across the sky in Turneresque smears. These static frames, brushed with merely ambient sound, are composed in radiant ignition.

Some minutes into the UK premiere of Wim Wenders and Juliano Riberdo Salgado's The Salt of the Earth at the benefit opening of the 2015 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, someone whispers in my ear: “So what does this have to do with human rights?”

This is how it started: I’d seen the preview a few months back, and was about a year into an only-watching-horror-movies thing that had developed as a strange post-trauma coping mechanism.

Nearly every review I’ve read has mentioned the fact that Birdman has been shot and edited in a way so as to seem as if it had been filmed in one single, continuous take.

The difference between Intimacies and Sex and the City is that the women in the film are not in psychoanalysis.

At one point near the end of his unfinished novel Jean Santeuil, Marcel Proust describes a painting by Claude Monet from 1897, titled “Bras de Seine près de Giverny”. It shows, in the painter’s hazy and colorful style, the branch of a river as it peacefully makes its way...