the vision machine

Feb 3, 2025 — The vibe in Park City was unsettling, but critics and juries discovered plenty of films to fall for.

Mar 12, 2021 — Deep Dives I can think of few movies that express the pain of being young better than Hiroshi Teshigahara and Kobo Abe’s Ako (1964). I first happened upon it by chance, lurking among the supplements on the Criterion edition of...

Sep 25, 2023 — There was a period under the Nixon administration when the collective American psyche, as seen on film, seemed almost convulsed by its fixation on the motor vehicle. Every other week a moviegoer might see a film that could broadly be...

Mar 30, 2021 — Mike Leigh’s midcareer masterpiece is one of the finest examples of his ability to construct riveting drama from ordinary life.

Oct 6, 2017 — “In both shape and sensibility, the work of Los Angeles-based filmmaker Ben Russell embodies a fluid yet holistic creative practice,” writes Jordan Cronk, introducing his interview for Film Comment. “A spiritual descendant of cinematic anthropologists Jean Rouch and Robert Gardner,...

Jan 20, 2015 — Here he is: the real, unreal Guy Maddin, in his phantasmagorical, polymathic stew of sex, memory, and dreams.

Aug 14, 2012 — The camera never stops moving in the Dardenne brothers’ portrait of a troubled teenage girl desperate for a job.

Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.

Jul 11, 2017 — A forged note brings chaos and corruption to the lives of everyone it touches in Robert Bresson’s devastating final film.

Oct 18, 2016 — Guillermo del Toro’s anti–Wizard of Oz refracts the surreal traumas of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of a young girl.