Modern Nature; Mana Pools; Malajube; Rocket; Grizzly Bear; Fleet Foxes; The Beta Band; Minus the Bear; Rose City Band; Tame Impala; Slowdive; Valerie June; Gordon Lightfoot; Wand; La Luz; The Lemon Twigs; Magdalena Bay; Roger Neil; David Bowie; El Michels Affair; Roge; Curtis Harding; David Byrne; Ghost Train Orchestra; Moondog; The Kronos Quartet; Saint Etienne; james k; Ivy; Anais and the Hoops; Trace Mountains; Haley Heynderickx; Max Garcia Conover; Gabriel Vitel; Dear Humans; The London Suede; Kyle Eastwood; Jonie Mitchell; Alicia Clara; Rachel Kitchlew; SFJ; SHOLTO; David Bardon; David Onka; Lorie Ladd; Reels Choir; Pat Kalla; Le Super Mojo; DjeuhDjoah; Rupert Pope; Giles Palmer; Metronomy; The Silver Snails; Whitmer Thomas; Movie Jail; Stereolab; Eleventh Dream Day; Avi Kaplan
How do we live with some of the shit that we’ve been forced to watch on a daily basis? Why are we so eager to immortalize the worst images that our world is capable of producing, and what kind of awful power do we lend such tragedies by sanctifying them into spectacles that can play out over and over again? -- David Ehrlich (see link below)
Nope (USA: Jordan Peele, 2022: 135 mins)
Flight, Thomas. "How Nope Tricks Your Ears." (Posted on Youtube: October 21, 2022)
---. "The Real Villain of Nope." (Posted on Youtube: September 29, 2022)
Hudson, David. "Oliver Laxe’s Sirât." Current (November 11, 2025) ["“The resilience of this group,” writes Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay, “their small-scale collectivism, and the way in which dance, and drugs, are a kind of social and even spiritual practice, as opposed to simple escapism, made me think of the late Mark Fisher’s final unfinished work, ‘Acid Communism,’ and his thinking here is an analogue to the movie’s techno-scored hedonic flow: ‘The crucial defining feature of the psychedelic is the question of consciousness, and its relationship to what is experienced as reality. If the very fundamentals of our experience, such as our sense of space and time, can be altered, does that not mean that the categories by which we live are plastic, mutable?’”"]
Skidmore, James. Contemporary World Cinema: An Introduction to Moving Pictures [Online, free, book on world cinema - great explanations of the basics of film analysis]
The poems, written by New York School poet Ron Padgett, appear on screen as they're read aloud in voiceover; they are ingenuous and winsome much like Jarmusch's films... PATERSON may be his most refreshing contradiction, a self-edit that puts not only his ethos into perspective, but also the whole concept of what it means to be an artist. - Kathleen Sachs (Cine-File, April 13, 2017)
Paterson doesn’t create his poems to be perfect, he doesn’t even want to read them out loud or publish. What seems to be truly important is the reflective and unconscious process of observing and putting words flow on paper. Despite of the art you’re making, Paterson tells us that there’s inspiration everywhere – it might come from chatter on the bus, strangers you meet on the street, from cherishing your loved ones, and even from such mundane object as the matchbox. - Inna GvozdovaJim Jarmusch jams
Anderson, Ellie and David Peña-Guzmán. "Cleanliness." Overthink #128 (April 22, 2025) ["How often should you shower to remain ‘clean’? How many times can you re-wear your jeans before they are considered ‘dirty’? In episode 128 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a look at cleanliness. They get into how humans have turned cleanliness into an art, and maybe even an obsession. Why are we so bothered by dirt? What is dirt, anyways? How are notions of dirtiness and cleanliness even into our symbolic systems, including language and religion? And what is up with TikTok’s obsession with the Clean Girl Aesthetic? As they tackle these questions, your hosts also explore the historical weaponisation of the concept of cleanliness against marginalised groups, such as queer people and people of color. In the bonus, Ellie and David discuss cleanliness as a social construct, the link between it and isolation, and Michel Serres’s ‘excremental theory’ of private property."]
Uncut Gems (USA: Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie, 2019: 135 mins)
This jolt of pure cinematic adrenaline affirmed directors Josh and Benny Safdie as heirs to the gritty, heightened realism of Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes. Adam Sandler delivers an almost maniacally embodied performance as Howard Ratner, a fast-talking New York jeweler and gambler in relentless pursuit of the next big score. When he comes into possession of a rare opal, it seems Howard’s ship has finally come in—as long as he can stay one step ahead of a wife (Idina Menzel) who hates him, a mistress (Julia Fox) who can’t quit him, and a frenzy of loan sharks and hit men closing in on him. Wrapping a vivid look at the old-school Jewish world of Manhattan’s Diamond District within a kinetic thriller, Uncut Gems gives us one of the great characters in modern cinema: a tragic hero of competing compulsions on a shoot-the-moon quest to transcend his destiny. - Criterion Collection
Reality, considered in itself and as a whole, is a chaos so deep and immense that it exceeds any possibility of being understood or experienced. Even something as small as a pebble, if we consider it to the full extent of its existence, becomes a mystery beyond comprehension. We can detect only a fragment of this chaos, as filtered by our perceptive apparatus and cognitive limits. Through our imagination, based on our personal inclinations and on the cosmological assumptions of our society, we mould this remaining piece into one of the infinite forms that reality can take. This activity of the imagination provides us with a cosmos, a 'world': a place where we can develop those structures of sense that shelter us from the trauma of having been thrown unprepared into a mortal life. Then, spurred by the force of habit and by a desire for comfort, we become progressively convinced that the world we have constructed is an accurate picture of 'nature,' and that reality coincides with the metaphysical consensus of a particular society at a certain moment in history. We tend to forget the imaginary essence of the 'world' that we see around ourselves, and we start drawing hard distinctions between what we seen as 'truly existing' and what we set aides as 'mere fantasy.' (4)
This, too, is a timely lesson: if rational languages, such as philosophy and science, aim to offer a structure of sense for human life, they must recognize themselves, at least in part, as forms of literature. If they want to make their hard logical kernel inhabitable by living creatures, they should not overlook the need to translate into the soft substance of narrative. (10)
Since the infinite chaos of reality will always exceed the limits of any conceptual system, we should recognize that all of our attempts at reducing it to a meaningful cosmos are merely 'likely stories' - like the eikos mythos of Plato's Timaeus - at once plagued by, and endowed with, the porous quality of literature. Every conceptual world that we might devise is ultimately a story for us to live by, and the better ones are not those that reach closer to an absolute truth beyond our grasp, but those that are spacious and flexible enough to offer an imaginary home where a dignified life for all becomes possible. (10 - 11)
Campagna, Frrederico. Otherworldly: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History. Bloomsbury, 2025.
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Abrams, Nathan. "Kubrick's World: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition." International Horizons (October 28, 2025) ["In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley Kubrick and what his work can teach us about our current era. From the nuclear absurdities of Dr. Strangelove to the cosmic rebirth of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s films expose the fragile line between technological mastery and moral collapse. Abrams unpacks Kubrick’s fascination with war, authority, and obedience, his roots in the New York Jewish intellectual tradition, and his exploration of mystical and mythic themes—from Kabbalah to The Odyssey. Together, they reveal how Kubrick’s cinematic universe reflects our own: a world where human creativity, paranoia, and power intertwine in both terrifying and illuminating ways."]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "What a Fool Believes: On the Unnumbered Card in the Tarot." Weird Studies #77 (July 8, 2020) ["'What a fool believes he sees, no wise man can reason away.' This line from a Doobie Brothers song is probably one of the most profound in the history of rock-'n'-roll. It is profound for all the reasons (or unreasons) explored in this discussion, which lasers in on just one of the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck, that of the Fool. The Fool is integral to the world, yet stands outside it. The Fool is an idiot but also a sage. The Fool does not know; s/he intuits, improvises a path through the brambles of existence. We intend this episode on the Fool to be the first in an occasional series covering all twenty-two of the major trumps of the Tarot of Marseilles." List of books mentioned/discussed on the page.]
Stonebridge, Lyndsey. "Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience." Recall This Book (September 4, 2025) ["Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lyndsey sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing."]
Irazuzta, Javier. The Prop and the Production Designer." Notebook (October 3, 2025) ["Eight industry veterans discuss a single object or piece of scenery from their work and its role in the worlds of their films."]
Nayman, Adam. "Jafar Panahi’s Revenge Road Trip Masterpiece." The New Republic (October 14, 2025) ["It Was Just An Accident reckons with cruelty and repression."]
Now, Gaspar. "“Cinema Is Connected to Dreams”: Lucile Hadžihalilović, in Conversation with Gaspar Noé." Interview (October 13, 2025) ["Lucile, best known for her hypnotic, unsettling films Innocence, Evolution, and her latest, The Ice Tower, a haunting new work starring Marion Cotillard, has built a body of films that explore transformation, awakening, and the mystery of being alive. That morning, she and Gaspar talked about the movies that shaped her. They’ve shared a life in cinema, but this was the first time they had really sat down to do something like this: a filmmaker looking back on the stories and images that formed her. What follows is not just a talk about movies, but about the process itself, the work, the obsession, the joy."]
"One Battle After Another (USA: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)." Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive of Resources)
"Unless I miss my guess, “First Reformed” will find its least receptive audiences among those who want either a conventional psychological drama or a dogmatic exposition of spiritual themes. Neither is what Schrader’s after. From the first, style as a way of engendering spiritual consciousness has been his primary concern. In a welcome new edition of Transcendental Style, he writes of creating 'an alternate film reality—a transcendent one,” in which, “The filmmaker, rather than creating a world in which the viewer need only surrender … creates a world in which the spectator must contemplate—or reject out of hand.'
Will the film’s most appreciative viewers be those who know Schrader’s writings, his previous work and the great films whose influence he freely acknowledges? No doubt. Yet “First Reformed” leaves its large front door open to anyone who accepts its invitation to adopt a contemplative stance toward cinema. For those who do, the film’s peculiar mysteries and beauties will be evident throughout: in its restrained compositions and uses of silence and empty space, in the almost liturgical unfolding of its narrative, in a climactic scene of imaginary flight and a final scene that seems aptly designed to leave one catching one’s breath, caught in the very act of contemplating this tale of faith and its worldly opponents." - Godfrey Cheshire
"First Reformed marks a considerable turning point, a film à thèse about the struggle for grace and faith in our modern world of hyper-reality and despair, especially when the various stopgaps offered by society—organized religion, political institutions, ecological activism—seem variously counterfeit. A breathtaking, taut work possessed of an otherworldly meditative stillness, it feels at once hauntingly out of time and haltingly urgent. " - Best Films of the Decade
