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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

  • Raised in Fear: The Superdynamational Horrors of Ray Ha...
  • CANNES 2013: Jia Zhang-ke's A TOUCH OF SIN
  • CANNES 2013: Joel and Ethan Coen's INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
  • CANNES 2013: Images, Part 1
  • VIDEO ESSAY: Wong Kar-Wai's Lust for Life

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Africa and France: The Work of Jean Rouch

Blogs
The French director Jean Rouch invented so many new cinematic forms that his films gave rise to new words: “ciné-trance,” “ethno-fiction.” Yet his prolific oeuvre has fallen in and out of favor; in the past few decades, it’s been hard to see most of his films in the United States.
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  • By Steven Erickson
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  • February 26, 2013 9:38 AM
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  • 1 Comment
More: Steven Erickson, Criterion

REVIEW: The Trials of (Not) Making a Movie in THIS IS NOT A FILM

Reviews
In the past two years, the Iranian government has moved from merely banning films (most of which were allowed to be released internationally) to arresting actors and filmmakers. Jafar Panahi is the highest-profile director to suffer such treatment. In 2010, his request to travel to the Berlin Film Festival was denied. He was arrested in March of that year, purportedly because he was making a film inspired by the protests following Iran’s 2009 election. In May, he was released on bail. In December, he was sentenced to six years in jail. Furthermore, he was banned from directing films, writing screenplays, giving interviews (even to Iranian media) and leaving the country for 20 years. While he appealed the sentence, he lost it in October 2011. Although he’s currently out of jail, he could be sent back at any moment.
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  • By Steven Erickson
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  • February 28, 2012 9:36 AM
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  • 0 Comments
More: Jafar Panahi, Steven Erickson

DVD REVIEW: JEAN-PIERRE GORIN: a new DVD box set spotlights the director's best documentaries

Reviews
At first glance, the title of "Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin" looks like a joke. If Jean-Pierre Gorin, a Frenchman who moved to San Diego to teach at UCSD in the ‘70s, is known in the U.S. at all, it’s because he collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard as a member of the Dziga Vertov Group. However, except for Tout Va Bien and Letter to Jane, most of the Dziga Vertov Group’s work is now difficult to see. Eclipse’s 3-DVD set of Gorin’s California-made documentaries, completed between 1980 and 1992, rescues them from oblivion. They’ve rarely been screened theatrically in the U.S. in the twenty years since the most recent one, "My Crasy Life," was made, apart from a 2010 retrospective at New York’s Migrating Forms festival.
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  • By Steven Erickson
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  • January 16, 2012 12:06 PM
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  • 0 Comments
More: Steven Erickson, Jean-Pierre Gorin

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