At the Museum
Goings-on at Museum of the Moving Image
Ambulante Más Allá is a roving documentary festival launched in 2005 that provides the framework for building a inclusive independent filmmaking infrastructure, reclaiming an often maligned community and helping them curate their own identities on and off screen.
The Pluto Moment by Zhang Ming is a delightful, quietly subversive film that, under the veil of a personal story, smuggles in details about the current cultural moment in China.
The Family confronts us with situations that are perfectly ordinary, without directing our interpretation. It’s only outside knowledge that complicates matters.
Vitaly Mansky’s latest film is a personal document of historical reckoning culled from hundreds of hours of footage collected during his tenure as official videographer for Putin’s election campaign and early presidency.
To process the layers of brutality and often half-hearted deceit that constitute much of contemporary public life in the former Soviet Union is no enviable task, but Loznitsa has taken it up with gusto.
Close is the kind of actor who excels at navigating the delicate balance between intense physicality, brewing shrewdness, and shattering vulnerability, which is why even her most morally compromised characters nonetheless have familiar strokes of humanity and sympathy.
Talal Derki remains close to this family, capturing meals, the children in bed or at play, men chatting before heading off to combat, rendered as normal as getting into a car for a morning commute.
In the films of Corneliu Porumboiu, seemingly insignificant details, questions, and disagreements ripple outward, like pebbles tossed into a still pond, until they become deep inquiries into history, language, and ethics.
Once There Was Brasilia is a sci-fi epic about assassins from space and the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, achieved on a shoestring budget.
In this mephitic atmosphere, an assertion of the sanctity of simple domestic pleasures (of pleasure itself) is tantamount to an act of artistic resistance.
The past is always present, but that does not just mean that it haunts or permeates our contemporary world: the past reconstitutes and recombines our very processes, internal and external, our molecules, our narratives.
Blake Williams has achieved a holistic union of his own that speaks at once to the transformative power of the moving image and the oceanic force of its full deployment.
Is Putin the cause or the result of Russia’s systemic ills? A tentative answer might be found in the Russian cinema of the 21st century, which, as it happens, coincides with the beginning and ongoing rule of this postmodern tsar.
The super-fan has progressed to secretary, then understudy, then professional and romantic usurper. Six years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, All About Eve tapped a rich vein of existential panic tied to the theme of replication and replaceability.