In his writings on cultural objects, Adorno self-consciously employed a prismatic and monadological method. The idea was to approach each cultural object as a monad, as a self-contained entity that, if viewed properly, could prismatically illuminate the character of the social totality. This essay seeks to apply a similar method to a work by Donald Judd: Untitled (1967).

Ken Collins’s portrait of Richard Diebenkorn, used to promote the recent L.A. Louver show of his works on paper, is peculiar in its emphasis on the distance between the camera and its subject . . .

And I wondered if I was awake or asleep, if it was the moon's paleness or Lucifer's, if it was midnight or dawn!

As if frozen in time, drone music has not developed as an art form since Young's Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics

It seems to have been forgotten, in recent years, that the basic relationship of the artist to the world in modernity is one of estrangement.

Is it possible Jurassic Park’s innovative special effects overshadow its true artistic depth?

Marguerite Duras’s essay “Joy: we believe: we don’t believe anymore” (1977) translated by Mia Ruf

“The betrayal of artists by society, their commitment to achieve through their efforts historical feats of the imagination and the myriad ways in which these are undermined, represents the real content of the film.”

Gilberto Perez’s commentary on history as seen through the lens of the filmmaker duo Straub-Huillet.

Jessa Crispin reflects on the 2021 Philadelphia Film Festival.

JC Holburn reviews Paul Schrader’s film The Card Counter

maybe, as the world collapses around us, we are haunted by an unconscious sense that maybe we have too much, maybe we are taking up too much space, maybe we are mostly takers and the only thing we really contribute is an endless stream of microplastics into our waterways.

We are often so resistant to directors taking the wheel, balking at the faintest hint of directorial domination over the audience — in this case, the director’s use of our bodies against us, manipulating us into identifying with someone whom our moral code rejects.

It was a time of mass shootings, Paris Hilton, boys playing games that looked like war on their consoles and soldiers waging war that looked like video games from drone centers.

Sofia Coppola doesn't seem to work so much with “the female gaze,” whatever that might mean. She doesn't watch women so much as she watches men watching women.

We're casting about, looking for anything that could possibly make the world even slightly less terrible. It's not even that strange that our conversation about films is much louder and emotional than, say, immigration reform or tax policy or Wall Street regulation.