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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.

THE REGULARS

Monthly Archives

GREY MATTERS: The lunatics are in the hall! It's the top 10 films about mental illness

Blogs

It’s been a good few years for crazy. "Homeland’s" made bipolar disorder a household ailment yet again. Sean Durkin’s "Martha Marcy May Marlene" located the goal posts between delusion and reality in its brainwashed hero’s mind and promptly moved them repeatedly (just like in real life!). And while William Friedkin’s incredibly distressing tale of mutually assured destruction, "Bug," may not have hewed to the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," its claustrophobic form of poetic, post-"Repulsion" address captured essential truths about madness a supposedly reality-based film like "A Beautiful Mind" could never touch.

By Ian Grey
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March 6, 2012 2:04 PM
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11 Comments

News

Matt Zoller Seitz: Have you heard there's a new Avengers trailer? All those great Marvel superheroes are in one trailer, just like in the comics! And Iron Man is there, and Thor, and .... sorry, I just can't get excited about this. As you might have heard, I'm sick unto death of superhero movies. Sick, sick, sick. I can't remember the last time I saw a big budget version that really departed from formula, in terms of either subject matter or tone -- Superman Returns is one, and that came out five years ago and flopped; anybody who wants to watch a quixotic defense of it can click here.

By Matt Zoller Seitz and Simon Abrams
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March 6, 2012 11:22 AM
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8 Comments

Television

About a third of the way through episode six of "Luck," a conversation between the horse trainer Turo Escalante and the veterinarian Jo is cut short by portents. A flock of birds erupts from behind, or within, the stands; silhouetted, they look like bats. The horses freak out. Then comes an earthquake. The walls tremble. The ground shakes. And then it's over.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
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March 6, 2012 1:02 AM
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0 Comments

Television

We head into "Mad Men’s" fifth season knowing nothing about it. The on-air promos recycle moments from past seasons, and the teaser art has been cryptic even by this show’s standards: an opening-credits-styled image of a falling man that could be hawking any season, and a photo of hero Don Draper staring at two mannequins — a clothed male and a naked female* — through a dress-shop window. Matthew Weiner, who banned advance screeners after a New York Times review revealed innocuous details from the season-four premiere, has dropped a cone of silence over the production. We have no idea if Don went through with plans to wed his young secretary, Megan; if Joan had Roger’s baby; or if the new agency is still in business. We don’t even know the year in which this season takes place, which at least would prepare us for the wingspan of Roger’s lapels.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
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March 6, 2012 12:50 AM
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1 Comment

Festivals

There's a strange sense of connectedness between the films I'm seeing at this year's True/False festival. Whether that's accidental or because of the way True/False is curated, I can't say, but some of the movies I'm seeing seem to be rhymes of other movies. Sometimes it's visual. Sometimes it's thematic. Often, it's both. This year's films seem to be grouped around intersections of race, healthcare, art, queerness, and activism. Having said this, I can't actually support this observation as well as I'd like, because the keystone film that ties all of this together in my own mind is one of those secret screenings I can't talk about. Listening to the buzz around the fest, I get the feeling that more than one of those secret films would supply the glue for this feeling of intersectionality.

By Christianne Benedict
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March 5, 2012 11:11 AM
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2 Comments

Festivals

"The thing is, directors and studios don't really like each other." Graphic designer Erik Buckham ought to know. He has a ringside seat. He designs movie posters. The nature of the business means that he deals with both studio marketing departments and control freak directors, but not always in equal measure. This comment explains a lot about why American movies look the way they do and a lot about why Buckham prefers to work on small films rather than big.

By Christianne Benedict
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March 4, 2012 10:10 AM
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0 Comments

Festivals

EDITOR'S NOTE: The True/False Film Festival, one of the leading showcases for nonfiction filmmaking in the US, unspools its ninth edition this weekend in Columbia, Missouri. We'll be featuring daily reports on the festival from film writer Christianne Benedict, a Columbia native who has attended and reported on the film festival since its beginning.

By Christianne Benedict
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March 2, 2012 7:08 AM
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0 Comments

SIMON SAYS: SNOWTOWN MURDERS and a Guided Tour Through Serial Killer Movies

Reviews

The Snowtown Murders comes out in theaters this week. Based loosely on a series of real-life murders that took place in Snowtown, Australia, the film serves as a great reminder of why serial killers in particular are interesting: they’re pathologically disturbed.

By Simon Abrams
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March 1, 2012 9:11 AM
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0 Comments

Video

This mesmerising video by filmmaker Gina Telaroli takes David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers as a cinematic slab upon which she splays a corpus oozing with audiovisual reference points. In the video's accompanying essay Telaroli's explains, "Genre could be a body transplant of sorts, a series of reconstructed appendages to approximate an ultimate, mass-manufactured body, story, romance." With appearances by Hitchcock, Caligari, Caravaggio, and dozens other sources for you to tease out. Originally published at the Moving Image Source.

By Kevin B. Lee
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February 29, 2012 12:35 PM
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0 Comments

Reviews

VIDEO: Watch the two embedded clips to compare the performance styles of two iconic front men: The Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger and The Talking Heads' David Byrne.

By Aaron Aradillas
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February 28, 2012 9:36 AM
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0 Comments

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