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
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
Resource extraction: the incendiary new Brazilian film Dry Ground Burning is the latest entry in a small canon of lo-fi insurrectionary speculative fables
Animal magnetism: the New York–based artist discusses her latest, a hybrid work of pandemic-inspired autofiction that blurs the boundaries between the authorial “I” and the subjectivities of its fictional characters
Blast off: This year's edition of the North Carolina festival demonstrated a robust hunger among post-pandemic audiences for challenging experimental film, video, and performance work
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