“This is a test. You will probably not be able to answer all of the questions.”—New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops, George Landow, 1976 Owen Land, aka George Landow—one of the founding, and most confounding, members of that moment dubbed by P. Adams Sitney (and…

By Andrew Tracy At the midpoint of Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008), what had heretofore been a largely dialogue-free immersion into the sights, sounds, and smells of an Irish prison takes a pointed interlude for a veritable torrent of discourse. In a lengthy, unbroken two-shot followed by two shorter close-ups, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and Father…

By Michael Sicinski A Separation is one of the year’s most accomplished films, and like so many films we might characterize as “accomplished,” it hasn’t garnered actual detractors. It merely fosters a coterie of skeptics. Several commentators felt that Farhadi’s film shouldn’t have won the Golden Bear over Béla Tarr’s more deserving The Turin Horse…

By Jonathan Rosenbaum For its 68th DVD release, the Austrian Film Museum, which published the first substantial book about James Benning in 2007, has begun the long-overdue project of restoring and releasing Benning’s work by starting at the approximate halfway point of his filmography—namely American Dreams (lost and found) (1984, 53 min.) and Landscape Suicide…

By Jay Kuehner Genealogy is compelling as a means of accountability: ancestry as an historical index into the past that somehow illuminates the present. The desire for a legible personal history is always hopeful, taking memory as redemptive in its recovery of lost episodes, marginal lives, traumas and triumphs. And yet, for a film that…

By Robert Koehler When we first found fire, we had our first movie. Once the flames began to curl around the wood, building up heat and its own thermal momentum, the fire took hold, and began to capture the imagination of those staring into the constantly flickering light, with stories and images emerging. For millennia,…

By Eva-Lynn Jagoe At the end of Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly, the title character, a benighted Dutch trader at a failed Malaysian outpost, is deserted by his beloved half-caste daughter Nina and determines to forget her before he dies. “He had a fixed idea that if he should not forget before he died he would…

By Michael Sicinski 1. David Gatten’s cinema is probably the clearest articulation of a broader tendency in contemporary experimental cinema. Filmmakers working in this mode are equally influenced by Romanticist and Formalist traditions. Personal expressivity and objective rigour are not so much stances as they are strategies, poles along which to suspend oneself in a…

By J.P. Sniadecki The celebrity status of Chinese artist, architect, and social activist Ai Weiwei has been steadily constructed over the past decade via his multimedia provocations and large-scale interventions in both art and politics. Combining a bold conceptual vision with a staunch belief in the artist’s role as social critic, his works have aimed…

By Olivier Père With The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist (1973), Sorcerer (1977), Cruising (1980), and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), to cite some of his most famous films, William Friedkin has made a deep impact on contemporary American cinema, establishing himself as one of the most talented and uncompromising of the New…

By Adam Nayman MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD The claw hammer that makes mulch of an amateur pornographer’s skull in the midpoint money shot of Kill List is a blunt instrument wielded with purpose. It’s the perfect avatar for Ben Wheatley’s style in his astonishing second feature. Working with cinematographer Laurie Rose and editor Robin Smith, both…