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 "The best video essay source on the web." (Roger Ebert) This is a web site built around original video essays and critical, personal writing about movies, TV, music, comics and whatever else interests its contributors. Co-founded by Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic for New York Magazine, and Ken Cancelosi, it is published by Seitz and Cancelosi and overseen by editor-in-chief Kevin B. Lee and managing editor Max Winter.

Video Essays

  • VIDEO ESSAY: Wong Kar-Wai's Lust for Life
  • VIDEO ESSAY: Directed by De Palma
  • "The First, The Last, My Everything" : Tilda Swinton Da...
  • BADLANDS: Terrence Malick’s “early, funny film”
  • On an Animation of a Sentence by Nathan Englander

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CANNES 2013: Joel and Ethan Coen's INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

Festivals
Plenty of films exist about struggling young artists trying to be great and failing in the process. But Joel and Ethan Coen’s "Inside Llewyn Davis" is unique in focusing on a great struggling young artist resigned to the idea of his own impending failure.
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  • By Glenn Heath Jr.
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  • May 19, 2013 3:20 PM
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  • 0 Comments
More: Cannes Film Festival, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Festivals, Inside Llewyn Davis, Glenn Heath Jr.

CANNES 2013: Images, Part 1

Festivals
Thick grey clouds paint the coastal horizon, and rain keeps falling. Massive yachts bob up and down in the choppy water while scattering festival attendees take cover under umbrella canopies.
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  • By Glenn Heath Jr.
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  • May 18, 2013 7:39 PM
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  • 0 Comments
More: Cannes Film Festival, Glenn Heath Jr., Festivals

CANNES 2013: Jia Zhang-ke's A TOUCH OF SIN

Festivals
Jia Zhang-ke sees modern day China as an expansive minefield of potential narratives, each one ready to trigger its own perspective on the countless institutional and societal issues that ultimately impact identity, gender roles, and economic expansion.
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  • By Glenn Heath Jr.
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  • May 17, 2013 12:04 PM
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  • 0 Comments
More: Glenn Heath Jr., Cannes Film Festival, Zhang Ke Jia

On an Animation of a Sentence by Nathan Englander

Blogs
It seems to me there are several different things going on in Drew Christie's animation of a sentence from the Nathan Englander story “The Reader.”
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  • By Max Winter
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  • May 13, 2013 8:46 AM
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  • 0 Comments
More: Animation

Raised in Fear: The Superdynamational Horrors of Ray Harryhausen

Blogs
You never forget the first time you fall in love, especially in the movies. My moment came when I was eight years old, at a Saturday matinee in a cramped multiplex theater. Setting my sights high, the object of my adoration was Kali, Hindu goddess of Time, Change, and Death, brought to life by the magical powers of Ray Harryhausen
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  • By Jed Mayer
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  • May 10, 2013 8:40 AM
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  • 0 Comments
More: Jed Mayer

VIDEO ESSAY: Wong Kar-Wai's Lust for Life

Video
Wong Kar-Wai, whose long-awaited The Grandmaster opens in August, is not about plot. Wong Kar-wai is about motion and emotion. As my friend Nelson Carvajal's new video suggests, he's about the moment within the moment, the eternal in the now. Beautiful neighbors pass in a stairwell and exchange lingering looks, or talk more softly than they need to so that they can be face-to-face. The camera (usually Chris Doyle's) doesn't merely record or represent: it scopes out, insinuates, measures and caresses. All is texture. Physical texture. Emotional texture. What it feels like. What it really is. What you dream it is. What you dream it was.
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  • By Nelson Carvajal and Matt Zoller Seitz
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  • April 25, 2013 2:09 PM
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  • 1 Comment
More: NELSON CARVAJAL, Matt Zoller Seitz, The Grandmaster

VIDEO ESSAY: Directed by De Palma

Video
It seems that video essayists are emerging every day—and if it isn't a new talent crossing our radar, it's someone whose extraordinary work we've somehow missed. The latter is the case with Joel Bocko, who's been making video essays since 2009.
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  • By Joel Bocko and Kevin B. Lee
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  • April 24, 2013 2:39 PM
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  • 0 Comments
More: Video, video essay, Kevin B. Lee, Joel Bocko

"The First, The Last, My Everything" : Tilda Swinton Dancing to Barry White at EbertFest 2013

Video
Ladies and gentlemen, as far as I'm concerned, this was the emotional highlight of EbertFest 2013.
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  • By Luke Boyce and Matt Zoller Seitz
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  • April 24, 2013 1:13 AM
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  • 2 Comments
More: Video, Roger Ebert (1942-2013), Tilda Swinton

BADLANDS: Terrence Malick’s “early, funny film”

Blogs
Malick’s 1973 debut "Badlands" is, thus far, the only film in his oeuvre in which humor is a significant component. If it isn’t a black comedy, then it is a singular and timeless art-house crime drama infused with greyish-brownish comedy.
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  • By Lincoln Flynn
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  • April 22, 2013 8:35 AM
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  • 0 Comments
More: Lincoln Flynn, Terrence Malick

Nobody Gets Out of Life Alive: THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE

Blogs
Some people find it disturbing that in Coen brothers films, the characters don't often have clear realistic referents and appear at first glance to be stereotypes, playthings created only to be sadistically ground up in the gears of a machine. I've never understood this objection.
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  • By Drew Gardner
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  • April 19, 2013 11:56 AM
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  • 1 Comment
More: Drew Gardner, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Billy Bob Thornton

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