Perhaps the strangest thing about Pluribus—Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s lauded new Apple TV series about humanity becoming infected by an extraterrestrial virus and  mentally united into a permanent groupthink-like state—is what it reflects. Released in 2025, the year of the great backlash against large language models (LLMs), all that critics and viewers have been able to talk about is how the series’ brainwashed, mentally “joined” humans, who are uniformly literal-minded and perfunctory, talk and behave exactly like ChatGPT.

Do we know what film is about today? The ersatz cinema which fills theaters seems to tell us definitively: No. Stone’s film is much more than a cultural product of its time. It’s one of the best films of the 1990s and still has a great deal to teach us about how film works, and what it means to make a political film.  

Last July, I was invited by Steffen Andrae, Hans Innenhof, and Günther Mailand to contribute a piece of criticism to the third edition of a series of concept shows organized by Mailand / Innenhof at Kontor 80, an experimental exhibition hall and event space in Leipzig, Germany.

The musicians’ interpretation of the song seems to combine tradition and modernity, with the brass band itself representing tradition and the adapted song representing the modern, contemporary. However, the brass orchestras appear oddly out of time, unintentionally comical. They seem to be enacting the funeral of what they represent—the postal service as a state enterprise, tradition, and society before globalization. Yet, for centuries, the postal service symbolized progress, innovation, and renewal.

If the forced collision of dramatic characters and public situations is understood as a metaphor for art, then according to Mailand / Innenhof, art’s role seems to be that of a troublemaker. However, the “theoretical and practical creation of situations,” which echoes a situationist self-understanding, doesn’t only target scientific or political events. It also aims at the so-called cultural sector, and thus at itself.

…what goes beyond the performance as surplus action becomes the real content of the film, its driving purpose. The actors don’t only play a version of themselves in Olho da Rua, they act at their acting as well and in such a way that the indications of confidence or doubt that flash across their features are never so clear. Is the feeling theirs or another’s? Is it real or feigned for the camera? Do they themselves know?

Rosenfeld’s treatment of Freimuth’s video recording, which is both poetic and critical, follows the notion of the historical materialist as presented by Brecht’s friend Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. Film as historical research does not mean recognizing “how it actually was.”

I do not like 80064. I do not like watching it over and over again for the purpose of this essay. It’s pornographic raw tape of the unmediated real deal. Bullying an old man is a lazy stand-in for the work of art. It would be better to live in in a world in which this video does not exist. But it does.

In Chu’s film, the dismantling becomes a metaphorical operation: it signifies a disassembly of reality into elements—akin to the montage character of film itself. But does this reveal the true reality of social labor? Hardly, because labor resists representation, both in its social function—as a source of surplus value—and in its everyday individual experience.

I penned the bulk of this review on the back of conversations with friends when we watched the film after it came to Hulu in the summer of 2023. But I sat on it, convinced that no one in the broader public had seen Chevalier — or ever would.

I knew I wanted to write a review of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence when I walked out of the theater and a man in front of me exclaimed to a woman by his side, "That was dogshit!" 

As if frozen in time, drone music has not developed as an art form since Young's Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics

It seems to have been forgotten, in recent years, that the basic relationship of the artist to the world in modernity is one of estrangement.

Is it possible Jurassic Park’s innovative special effects overshadow its true artistic depth?

C. Philip Mills reviews Skinamarink

Gilberto Perez’s commentary on history as seen through the lens of the filmmaker duo Straub-Huillet.

After Effect — James Turrell’s latest “Wedgework” (recently presented by Pace) — takes up this question of the imaginary dimensions of time and space and their relationship to perception, memory, and thought.

Cinema remains the least understood of major arts. So often film commentaries discuss mostly, or only, the plot. But to begin to understand any film, one must examine it as cinema, shot by shot, edit by edit, in terms of composition, lighting, movement, editing rhythms and juxtapositions, and more, because the way the viewer sees its depictions affects how one feels and thinks about what is shown

JC Holburn reviews Paul Schrader’s film The Card Counter

maybe, as the world collapses around us, we are haunted by an unconscious sense that maybe we have too much, maybe we are taking up too much space, maybe we are mostly takers and the only thing we really contribute is an endless stream of microplastics into our waterways.