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.

The view of art underlying the essay, and the type of film that remains my principal, though not only, model for greatness in cinema, have themselves been bypassed by much that has happened since, in particular the emphasis on the politics of an artwork, and on various aspects of the artist's identity rather than complexity of internal form.

It was a time of mass shootings, Paris Hilton, boys playing games that looked like war on their consoles and soldiers waging war that looked like video games from drone centers.

How do we know something really happened unless it is recreated and simplified dramatically by a diverse ensemble cast, headed by Jeff Daniels, and captured on blue tinted film?

Sofia Coppola doesn't seem to work so much with “the female gaze,” whatever that might mean. She doesn't watch women so much as she watches men watching women.

Every time a new technology is invented our first thought is, how can I use this to get off? Our second: how can we use this to talk to the dead?

Art, that great teacher, says to us, like Robert Frost’s most famous lines, “Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”

We're casting about, looking for anything that could possibly make the world even slightly less terrible. It's not even that strange that our conversation about films is much louder and emotional than, say, immigration reform or tax policy or Wall Street regulation.

Kelly, I say, has been islanding, becoming island, all sea, breeze, epos now, all crossroads, it bringing the news, that is poetry.

Martin Eden is the story of an autodidact who, in transcending his social class and achieving artistic success, becomes trapped in both the strictures of the culture industry and the confines of his own rigid ideology.

Contemporary commonsense says that the preservation of art — as art — is not a life and death situation, but consider the case of Andrew Cunanan.

The culture industry is running on a marathon of apologies. Miss Americana, the Taylor Swift biopic on Netflix, is a prime example of pop-culture apologia bound up in a coming-of-age tale.