In Annie Baker's Pulitzer-winning play The Flick, tensions over race, sex, and labor automation appear in a mirror In November of 2011, around the time Roger Ebert wrote...
Terror by Night, 1946 Despite longer odds and smaller payoffs, America produces more independent filmmakers every year. What the hell are they thinking? Recently a friend of...
Screenshot from Amiri Baraka's The New-Ark (1968), showing as part of Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986 A small tour of independent...
Still from What Farouki Taught In the best documentary films, artifice isn't an obstacle to truth, it's a way in The great irony of so-called nonfiction cinema...
Publicity photograph for Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, 1966 In our flat content world, what becomes of classic filmmakers who haven't died yet? And will anyone replace them? On...
When it comes to summer entertainment, movies are shouting about nothing into empty theatres. Then they kill everyone Summer movies promise us many things, but mostly they promise...
The Ecstasy of the Angels Despite all odds and with no obvious financial incentives, a few directors still make movies that seek to re-imagine the form I...
Still from Raw (2016) At this year’s top film festival, people are served IF you go to enough fancy film festivals, trends start to emerge. Some years,...
Stuck in between the Hollywood star system and nascent independent cinema, Richard Pryor never got the roles he deserved -- and it's our loss These are confusing...
A still from Blue Chips In this month's installment of Aspect Ratio, Brandon compares the new anti-NCAA documentary Schooled and the classic college basketball corruption movie Blue...
...the Hotel Theresa in Harlem after the State Department worked behind the scenes to get his delegation blocked from another establishment. The ploy backfired; as Malcolm X put it, the...
...King of Kings, 1961 In gay priest Malcolm Boyd's popular prayerbook Are You Running With Me, Jesus?, queer insight elevated Christian practice When thou prayest, thou shalt not...
...spotlight,” Malcolm McCullough, a theorist of architecture, writes in Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. “Although your gaze usually indicates where your deliberate attention has been directed,...
...Secret Admirer is a reading with a mystery curator whose name is revealed at the end. This edition features readers Malcolm Harris, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Leon Chang, Jacob Bakkila...