Persistence of vision: critic Yasmina Price leads a panel conversation at the New York African Film Festival exploring legacy of the great filmmaker Safi Faye, who passed away in February
I Can Has Cheezburger: the artist duo discuss their latest mash up of pop-culture touchstones, a surprisingly perceptive analysis of the political and cultural moment
Good looking out: this year’s edition features an admirable range of work by major filmmakers, including Tsai Ming-liang, and emerging artists like Ayanna Dozier and Kimi Takesue
Casting spells: the stalwart of American experimental film, who passed away last August, left behind five decades’ worth of intimate, illusive, and ritualistic films
Time fades away: on the occasion of Shinji Somai’s ongoing retrospective at the Japan Society, critic Emerson Goo offers a primer on the director’s audacious, and enduring, filmography
Back to life: Evil Dead Rise, more than other reboots of the franchise, gets closer to squeezing real feelings out of the scenario without ever going soft on the gory trappings
Riding high: Malcolm Harris, author of a history of Palo Alto, discusses the cinema of Northern California’s most disruptive region, from Muybridge’s animal locomotion studies to dot-com era techno thrillers
Stormy skies: Laura Citarella’s uncanny epic, Trenque Lauquen, is not the kind of detective story whose secrets are explained by hard facts; rather, its pleasures are rooted in the very principle of investigation
Child’s play: Ari Aster’s latest living nightmare, Beau Is Afraid, stars Joaquin Phoenix as a stunted, paranoid mama’s boy, caught up in a roller coaster of horrors—and is not quite as interesting as one would hope
Sign up for the Film Comment Letter!
Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week. Enter your email address below to subscribe.