If I Were for Real

Feb 21, 2007 — It was bound to happen. After a good start for the blog, a quiet stretch. The year has gotten off to a busy start. Every minute there seems to be a meeting with a new player about a new technology...

Jun 19, 2006 — Decades after its backyard birth, Jack Woods’s DIY horror movie has forged a model of inspiration for succeeding generations of effects artists and low-budget filmmakers.

Oct 15, 2001 — The music in Benjamin Christensen’s classic constantly refers to something deeper, creating a sort of deep pity in preparation for the ending of the film.

Sep 24, 1992 — It was in 1947 that Vladimir Nabokov began writing what he described as “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.” Completed in 1954, the manuscript was rejected as pornographic by at least four New York publishers. Nabokov...

Aug 25, 2026 — The pioneering husband-and-wife duo transformed the field of Japanese nonfiction cinema with their portraits of spectacular, edgy personalities and collectives under duress.

Jun 22, 2026 — A quiet highlight of last fall’s festival season, Milagros Mumenthaler’s third feature tours theaters through July.

Jun 22, 2026 — Deep Dives In 1971, upon the release of his first and only feature film, James Bidgood pulled a disappearing act. He had spent the better part of seven years shooting Pink Narcissus, a hallucinatory tale of a daydreaming gay hustler, on...

Jun 10, 2026 — Early reviews of his thirty-fifth feature may be all over the place, but appreciation of the man himself is universal.

May 19, 2026 — “Last night, I was in the Kingdom of Shadows,” proclaimed Maxim Gorky, writing about an 1896 projection of films by Auguste and Louis Lumière in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. “Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and...

Oct 10, 2025 — This week: Essays on Daniel Day-Lewis, Sophie Fillières, and Miguel Gomes, a talk with Wes Anderson, and an AI experiment.