A visual poet with a penchant for knockabout brawling, an idealist who gravitated to tales of melancholic loss, a notorious tyrant who cultivated long friendships, a nineteenth-century sensibility revered by many a hardcore modernist: John Ford, as they say, contained multitudes.

By Monty Majeed | June 26, 2015
Festival Dispatch

Kashish has grown into south Asia’s biggest queer film festival, was voted as one of the top five LGBT festivals in the world, and is today India’s only LGBT film festival given official permission to be held in a mainstream cinema hall.

Yang’s games are explicitly political, explicitly homoerotic, explicitly masculine. They are technologically proficient and artistically confident. They are some of the most exciting works produced in the video game form in recent times, and are well worth engaging with.

By Jordan Cronk | June 11, 2015
Festival Dispatch

Arabian Nights is essentially composed of a series of indulgences and digressions—some angry and some absurd, all imaginatively composed and unconcerned with the boundaries of traditional storytelling.

By Morad Moazami | June 9, 2015
At the Museum

Mad Men is about a young nation’s dubious promise and potential for continual reinvention, and the desire this instills in the individual to forget one’s history and past, and in its place, construct another life and identity afresh.

By Sean Flynn | May 27, 2015
At the Museum

The “Sensory Stories” exhibit at Museum of the Moving Image is a playground for visitors of all ages to have personal encounters with emerging media technologies, novel interfaces, and experimental narrative forms that haven’t yet stabilized as familiar conventions.

By Jordan Cronk | May 21, 2015
Festival Dispatch

The strain from the unfortunate state of worldwide film funding has been felt more than ever at this year’s festival. Features Louder Than Bombs, In the Shadow of Women, One Floor Below.

Alien: Isolation’s ingenuity as a work that adapts a film to a video game is in its tacit acknowledgment that the player knows what is going to happen in this universe. It’s a retread of the original film, but one that is aware it is a retread.

By Fernando F. Croce | April 17, 2015
At the Museum

Face originated as part of a program of cinematic projects commissioned by and filmed in the Louvre . . . virtually each shot is an autonomous set piece, not so much building blocks in a linear storyline as visual-aural objects whose splendor works to mitigate the pervasive mood of despair.

By Chris Wisniewski | April 16, 2015
At the Museum

To the extent that Weiner conceived Peggy as a proto second wave feminist, one can see The Best of Everything’s Caroline as the template from which she is fashioned.

By Eric Hynes | April 14, 2015
Festival Dispatch

It was when winter finally started conceding to spring, with arctic temperatures reversing course overnight into short-sleeve weather and blinding sunshine, that word came through that Albert Maysles had passed away.

The rampant gentrification experienced in Berlin over the last decade has taken a heavy toll on the city’s much-touted cultural diversity. Yet, one area that’s proved remarkably resilient is film—or, more specifically, film-watching.

By Michael Koresky | March 13, 2015
At the Museum

There’s a central, important contradiction to the show, which is our ad-exec main character feels enormously, existentially detached from the materiality of everyday life—the very things, concepts, and ideas he is meant to be hawking (except, perhaps, for Hershey bars).

By Damon Smith | March 2, 2015

Science, art, and the spiritual have been linked for centuries across pictorial traditions, but they achieve a unique synthesis in 2001: A Space Odyssey, an audaciously cerebral epic that, whenever seen or contemplated in its original 70mm format, never feels like anything less than a miracle of human imagination.