January 17, 2025
Years in Review

Nickel Boys, Janet Planet, Hard Truths, Dahomey, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Juror #2, Evil Does Not Exist, The Beast, All We Imagine as Light, I Saw the TV Glow

By Dan Schindel | January 3, 2025
At the Museum

The rise of affordable filmmaking tools, the internet, smartphones, and social media platforms have led to many words written in the 21st century about the broadening power to create and distribute cinema. In parallel, there has been a related but less-discussed rise in the essay film.

The way we see a game—whether we can control the camera or not, whether the frame moves or is static, how the frame moves—is an artistic quality as important as (and often interlocked with) its interface, its methods of immersion...

Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Mask, Arrebato, The Stuff, Cuadecuc, vampir, Tall Shadows of the Wind, Drag Me to Hell.

By Kelli Weston | October 30, 2024
This Must Be the Place

Although shot in 2000, Frailty heralds themes that would trouble the coming era (and its cinema): Christofascist warfare, “cleansing” the region of unsavory figures, the son split between patriarchal fidelity and his own scruples.

By Asha Phelps | September 26, 2024
At the Museum

Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. The story of the Jordan family being forced by harsh economic realities to give up the farm they''d worked for decades is a poignant and beautiful epic in miniature.

By Vikram Murthi | September 19, 2024
First Look 2024

The Featherweight actively engages with core ideas behind direct cinema and verité, residing in a blurry middle ground between the two genres, that is between minimizing a documentarian’s presence and actively participating in the action.

By Asha Phelps, Jeff Reichert | September 18, 2024
At the Museum

Everything in documentary filmmaking is an ethical question. Every placement of the camera. Every question you ask or don't ask is an ethical choice. But the hardest choices are made in the cutting room because that's when you really are saying, this will be seen by the world.

By Nicholas Russell | July 30, 2024
Unearthed

The narrative framing echoes that of Lake Mungo and other mockumentaries, the events having already taken place, the yarn unspooled by an unseen director and editor, with the found footage elements appearing less as real-time documentation than forensic evidence.

Like all cultural practices, film acting is a historical palimpsest: new affects, tones, and gestures jostle with older ones, and what makes something feel contemporary is often a matter of some contingency.

For the third year, Museum of the Moving Image film curators have visited the Cannes Film Festival and have engaged in a dialogue about the films on offer.

If consumers are paying the big bucks for a game (especially one they have technically already played), what are they actually getting? Padding is, unfortunately, almost always the answer, but Rebirth takes it one step further by padding an arguably padded extension of a fragment of an existing game.

By Mark Asch | May 10, 2024
First Look 2024

The film is another of brothers Bill and Turner Ross’s immersions in the regional euphoric...The filmmakers are after a kind of Herzogian ecstatic truth, often to be found in the kinds of spaces where someone is likely to be rolling on literal ecstasy.

By Max Carpenter | May 7, 2024
Screen Play

The strange metaphysical mingling of ersatz furniture and moments of raw human authenticity on game showsfeels like a rupture. These programs are traversable on-ramps for real people to appear as real people in the big leagues of television.