Experimental Film

May 27, 2026 — Is it possible to look without trying to grasp the object of one’s gaze? Traditional ethnographic documentaries, much like the written ethnographies that preceded them, have attempted to explain a given culture to those who don’t belong to it, assuming...

Apr 16, 2026 — This month, take a peek at movie history through the prism of the ’80s: our collection of the decade’s best remakes and the originals that inspired them reveals an era of wild reinventions and sly revisionism.

Aug 8, 2025 — This week: Edward Yang, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and alternative lists of the best films of the twenty-first century.

May 30, 2025 — The week wraps with an overlooked gem starring Jamie Lee Curtis, a new issue of Cineaste, and conversations with Lisa Lu and Takashi Miike.

Jun 11, 2024 — A radically strange, postmodern adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film is grounded by a sweaty, seething, meaty eroticism—a confrontational sexuality that remains bracing.

Sep 30, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 More than eight decades since its release, Dos monjes (1934) continues to invite reappraisals, as much for its expressionist style—exceptional within Mexican cinema—as for its nonlinear narrative and for the creative contributions of...

Mar 3, 2020 — American cinema is over 125 years old, and African Americans have been a part of it from the beginning. This participation has often been fraught, stymied, and curtailed, but the desire to use motion pictures to craft a self-image has...

Sep 4, 2019 — With their novelistic density and sexual openness, the films of French master André Téchiné introduced director Stephen Cone to a strange new world of contradictions.

Nov 6, 2017 — “One of the disorientations of where we’re at—the obliterative sucking splotch of a present tense in which we now all live—is that it feels simultaneously like a malign mischance and like something we should have seen coming a mile off,”...

Oct 19, 2017 — New York. “Feverish, fragmented, expressionistic, The Sin of Nora Moran (1933) is one of the most formally daring films to come out of Hollywood in the early sound era,” begins Imogen Sara Smith in her overview for Film Comment of...