Bächle, Thomas Christian and Jascha Bereis. "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons." New Books in Science, Technology, and Society (August 19, 2025) ["Autonomous weapons exist in a strange territory between Pentagon procurement contracts and Hollywood blockbusters, between actual military systems and speculative futures. For this week's Liminal Library, I spoke with Jascha Bareis, co-editor of The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025), about how these dual existences shape international relations and cultural imagination. The collection examines autonomous weapons not just as military hardware but as psychological tools that reshape power dynamics through their mere possibility. These systems epitomize what the editors call "the fluidity of violence"—warfare that dissolves traditional boundaries between human decision and machine action, between targeted strikes and algorithmic inevitability. Bareis and his contributors trace fascinating connections between fictional representations and military doctrine—how Terminator narratives influence Pentagon planning while actual weapons development feeds back into artistic imagination. The book wrestles with maintaining "meaningful human control" over systems designed to operate faster than human thought, a challenge that grows more urgent as militaries worldwide race toward greater autonomy. Each chapter reveals how thoroughly we need to rethink human-machine relationships in warfare, from the gendered coding of robot soldiers in film to the way AI imaginaries differ between Silicon Valley and New Delhi. Autonomous weapons force us to confront uncomfortable realities about agency, violence, and the increasingly blurred line between human judgment and algorithmic certainty."]
Castro, Collette de. "Great Actors: Tilda Swinton." Senses of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["Tilda Swinton is forever changing before our eyes. While writing this article, I became aware of two new productions she starred in that haven’t been released yet. In one, she plays an egocentric New York artist with curly red hair, a favourite green suit, and a superiority complex. In the other, she embodies the paranoiac mother of a wealthy family, singing heartily to protect her family in a bunker as the world ends. And this is after she said that the film she made before both of these, The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024), may be “the last film I make.” It could be that she’s goading me: “Just try to keep up!”"]
Koski, Genevieve, et al. "The Kids Aren't All Right, Pt. 2: Weapons." The Next Picture Show #489 (September 2, 2025) ["Zach Cregger’s WEAPONS overlaps with Atom Egoyan’s THE SWEET HEREAFTER in both its broad narrative setup — a town grapples with the sudden disappearance of a group of children — and its non-traditional structure, but diverges considerably in its tone. Then again, WEAPONS diverges considerably from its own tone as it goes on, artfully shifting gears as it makes its way through a story that prioritizes entertainment value over horror allegory. We’re joined once again by Vulture movie critic Alison Willmore to talk about why that approach worked so well on us, and less so on the film’s detractors, before bringing THE SWEET HEREAFTER back in to discuss how each film’s broken timeline serves to reveal the intricacies of a community shattered by grief and anger."]
Moreland, Quinn. "Person of Note: Love, Obsession, and Fandom." Notebook (August 22, 2025) ["“Lurker” explores the parasocial relationship between the modern fan and the modern artist."]
O'Donoghue, Darragh. "The Sleeping Beast Within." Senses of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["On paper, The Sleeping Beast Within is a straightforward detective story, complicated by elements of the newspaper exposé, the youth movie, the middle-class shōshimin-eiga (in particular the contemporary films of Ozu Yasujirō), and even the horror genre. Long-serving salaryman Ueke Junpei (Ashida Shinsuke) is sacked by his company and goes missing after a trip to Hong Kong. His distraught daughter Keiko (Yoshiyuki Kazuko) and her pushy reporter friend Kasei Shotaro (Nagato Hiroyuki) investigate. It transpires that Junpei, after a lifelong dedication to respectability and service resulting in emasculation, humiliation, and impoverishment, has opted for a more lucrative and empowering association with organised crime. Suzuki’s analysis is conducted entirely through genre – and the reversal of genre. The detective-journalists expose the father or surrogate father praised at the beginning. It is the adults and not the civic-minded youths who disrupt moral norms. The salarymen are criminal masterminds, not pitiable losers. The horror is an internal, not external threat. And although Suzuki himself would not be ‘discovered’ by the west for another three decades, he engages with the work of the most internationally celebrated Japanese filmmaker, Kurosawa Akira. The Sleeping Beast Within intriguingly echoes the same year’s Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well), wherein Mifune Toshiro joins a company to investigate his father’s death; the latter film begins with a group of journalists discussing corporate corruption. The earlier Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949) likewise used tropes of the American crime genre to explore post-war Japanese society. Suzuki’s Junpei could be Shimura Takashi’s terminally ill bureaucrat in Ikiru (1952) if he turned to crime instead of the public good."]
Skarsgård, Alexander and Harry Lighton. "On Pillion." Films at Lincoln Center (October 8, 2025) ["Harry Lighton and Alexander Skarsgård discuss Pillion with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim at the 63rd New York Film Festival. In his unorthodox queer romance, Harry Lighton crafts a film about a sadomasochistic relationship that is both transgressive and disarming, starring Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård in fearless performances as a mild young man and his leather-clad dom lover." Pillion trailer]-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Paul Thomas Anderson’s seventh film, Inherent Vice, is a straightforward page-to-screen adaptation of Pynchon’s late-career detective novel. Not immediately a particularly large critical or commercial success, its regard has grown over time (especially as Joaquin Phoenix has become a bigger and bigger star). I’ve seen this film half a dozen times, including at the recent 70mm revival at Film at Lincoln Center, and think it’s both Anderson’s best film and a significant improvement on the source material (which is source material that I quite like).
Unlike Perry, who simply substituted his own sense of humor for Pynchon’s, Anderson matches the layered humor of the novel; every frame has a visual joke and you want to laugh at every line twice. More than that, Anderson brings real depth to some of Pynchon’s more spiky characters. Owen Wilson as Coy Harlingen, Benicio Del Toro as Sauncho Smilax Esq.––both are more rounded and compelling in the film. Unlike in End of the Road where the ostentatious collaging distracts from and weakens the content, the images of Inherent Vice––the view of Manhattan Beach between two squat houses, the last supper scene, the curved and canine golden fang headquarters––add to the texture of the work. The music––Can, Neil Young, the Jonny Greenwood originals––is brilliant too. It’s a really accomplished piece of work. - Gideon Leek
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The film editor who worked on The Social Network once told me that whenever he came across the name Mark Zuckerberg in the news, the face that flashed through his mind belonged to Jesse Eisenberg. I could relate: Sometimes, I have to remind myself that “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook” is an inspired Aaron Sorkin–Eisenberg alley-oop and not, like, real-life Zuck footage that I must’ve come across on 60 Minutes once. Eisenberg’s bitter patter, clipped condescension, and wounded pride in The Social Network may not be an exact impersonation of Zuckerberg, but it’s something more lasting: the embodiment of both the guy and a generation. Eisenberg had neither a Facebook account nor any familiarity with Zuckerberg when he took the role. (He was in the car driving to Facebook HQ unannounced to see whether he could stroll in and shake hands with the man himself when producer Scott Rudin and the studio’s legal department called off this pavement-pounding recon mission. Eisenberg settled for listening to a lot of Zuck interviews.) Director David Fincher’s advice? “Figure out a way to remain an enigma,” Fincher remembered. “Be more opaque,” Eisenberg recalled. The resulting character study is both intimate and aloof, curated and revealing. Even all these years later, that’s what a Facebook profile is all about. —Baker
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Classical snobs love to point out that there seem to be as many influences on Williams’ “Star Wars” score as stars in the sky: Korngold, Copland, Holst, Dvořák, and Wagner just to name a few. Some — looking at you, Sirius XM “Symphony Hall” host Preston Trombley — all but allege theft. Yet the creation of the “Star Wars” score is much like the creation of Facebook: If any of those other composers had created the “Star Wars” score, they would have created the “Star Wars” score. Moreover, none of them created a melody somehow so lushly orchestral yet Top 40-ready that a disco remix of it went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Something that could suit the London Symphony Orchestra and Studio 54.
Beyond the iconic main theme, there’s innovation all over the “Star Wars” score: The extraordinary repeated triple-beat as the Imperial Star Destroyer enters the frame like a leviathan in an opening shot that does more to establish scale than any other opening shot in movie history; the use of steel drums for a jazzy riff on “The Charleston” to create the famous “Mos Eisley Cantina” theme; the bassoon-driven “Darth Vader theme” (no composer of movie music has known what to do with bassoons better than Williams); the stuttery “Imperial Motif” (so good the “Imperial March” from “The Empire Strikes Back” is almost redundant); the thundering bass drums that resound shortly after Grand Moff Tarkin barks “Evacuate? In our moment of triumph?”; the four-note “Death Star” motif that captures the inherent pulp of “Star Wars” better than any other leitmotif and shows that this franchise exists much closer to ‘50s sci-fi than any franchise since. And then with “The Throne Room” somehow it out-Rockys the “Rocky” theme.
But if there’s a true Williams signature it’s his affinity for introducing a musical theme with minimal orchestration and then instantly repeating it with a full 110-piece orchestra chiming in, as heard on “Imperial Cruiser Pursuit.” It’s instant crescendo, the orchestral equivalent of turning the amp up to 11. And there’s almost nothing like it in movie music before Williams. —CB
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"Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner play academics enlisted by the military to make contact when alien spacecraft land on Earth in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi drama… How refreshing to watch an alien contact movie in which no cities are destroyed or monuments toppled, and no adversarial squabbling distracts the human team from the challenges of their complex interspecies encounter. Anchored by an internalized performance from Amy Adams rich in emotional depth, this is a grownup sci-fi drama that sustains fear and tension while striking affecting chords on love and loss… ARRIVAL boldly snubs the standard alien-invasion vernacular of contemporary movies to explore a mood and language of its own. It may be a touch too subdued for the mainstream, but the movie has brains and originality, qualities these days too seldom valued in the genre." - David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------In a way, Edward Anhalt and John Milius’s script for “Jeremiah Johnson” crystallizes what Westerns have been chasing ever since: It’s spare, unfussy, and full of poetic character. But for all the ways in which “Jeremiah Johnson” has proven enduring and influential, this under-appreciated classic is a truly singular film at heart — a portrait of a true ‘70s loner who just happens to be living in the Rocky Mountains in the 1840s. Drawing inspiration from period vernacular and the poetry of Carl Sandburg, Anhalt and Milius’s script is laser-focused on the search for what really matters in life, and the search that happens within oneself. Director Sydney Pollack, proving his extraordinary range and gifts, opened himself up as well to find this movie in the edit, a seven-and-a-half month assembly process following a shoot all over the snowy wilds of Redford’s adopted state of Utah. Far more than “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Jeremiah Johnson” is the real birth of Sundance — many of the landscapes here seem just a stone’s throw from Main Street in Park City. The result is both purposeful in the writing and loose enough to let in a real feeling of life, the kind of experiential rhythm that you can’t find in a studio. This is as quiet and most introspective as Westerns get.
It also has one of the ultimate ‘70s cinematic moments, an instant that sums up the spirit of the decade onscreen better than maybe any other bit of dialogue. While those opposed to the Vietnam War burned their draft cards, Jeremiah Johnson deserts the army altogether, who were then fighting the Mexican War. Sometime after his abandonment of the fight he encounters a patrol of soldiers and asks if the war is still going. So much time has passed that the patrol’s officer isn’t sure which war he means. “The war against the president of Mexico,” Jeremiah clarifies. “It’s over!” comes the response. So then Jeremiah asks, his tone of voice perfectly calibrated to convey a mix of mild curiosity and ultimate indifference: “Who won?” —CB
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Even if Francis Ford Coppola’s opus had been content to be a simple gangster movie, a larger-than-life gravitas would still have been required properly play Vito Corleone. At its core, “The Godfather” is a story about the inexhaustible gravitational pull that our families have on us, and that force is initially derived from one man whose presence is so strong that he can bend his sons and soldiers to his will with the subtlest of facial expressions.
But “The Godfather” is not a simple gangster movie. From Amerigo Bonsera’s iconic opening declaration that “I believe in America,” Coppola made his ambitions nakedly clear: He was telling a story about the very fabric of the United States, using a family of immigrants who got very rich as a way to explore the country’s seemingly contradictory principles of family loyalty and unrepentant personal ambition. The tension between old and new ways of doing things intersected at one man, an all-powerful mafia Don who retained the loyalty of his community’s old-school traditionalists who frequently benefitted from the very norms he selectively followed himself as he prepared to pass a more dangerous world onto his children. The role could have only been played by someone woven into the fabric of America itself.
Enter: Marlon Brando. A former heartthrob who played some of the most significant protagonists of mid-century American drama on both stage and screen, he was an instantly recognizable figure with unimpeachable dramatic bona fides. With his ’50s and ’60s heyday firmly behind him, he entered the New Hollywood era with a new look and an earned calmness that reflected a lifetime’s worth of hard lessons. His take on the Corleone family patriarch was loving and sadistic in equal measure, but never allowed his poker face to slip and reveal his true intentions. It was a career-defining performance from an actor who had already given us two or three of them, filling every vacuum of power and energy that Coppola left in the frame for him and still leaving enough meat on the bone for a guy named Robert De Niro to win an Oscar telling his origin story. —CZ
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From body to mind does Joaquin Phoenix map his maladjusted misfits. Is there an actor alive who can reveal more of a stunted psychology with the mere clench of a jaw or the jut of a bony shoulder? The Master is his master class, a profile of haunted, volatile postwar masculinity told in telltale alien mannerisms: the crooked, sideways curl of his mouth, the boyish impatience of how he stands, curvy as a question mark, hands clutching his sides. As Phoenix plays him, Freddie Quell is pure id, a creature (or “silly animal,” to quote Philip Seymour Hoffman’s charlatan religious guru, Lancaster Dodd) driven by his appetites and impulses. He farts, he fights, he fucks the beach, he smashes a toilet, but beneath these showboating outbursts of primitive emotion, the possibility of a deeper soul (or perhaps a thetan awaiting liberation) tantalizingly, even tragically glimmers. You look at this dog-loyal, half-mad disciple and want to unpack the enigma of his existence; he’s a Rorschach test, just like the one Freddie reads as a porno mag in the opening minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s enduringly mysterious character study. —Dowd
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"The first film in eight years from the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien is an immaculate treasure box of light, texture and movement – though just when you think you’ve pinned it down, it slips your grasp as nimbly as its lead character darting through a silver birch grove. For the first time in his estimable 35-year career, Hou has made a wuxia, or period martial-arts film… If you’ve seen swordsmen and/or women bouncing through a bamboo forest, you’ve seen wuxia – yet you’ve almost certainly never seen it carried off with this degree of delicacy and refinement. There’s a little forest-bouncing here, but the fight scenes are few and far between." - Robbie Collin, The Telegraph
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------One of the great Upper East Side movies, Paul Mazursky’s feminist romantic dramedy “An Unmarried Woman” is also one of the most emotionally intelligent American movies of the 1970s: The story of Erica Benton (Jill Clayburgh), who must come to terms with her husband (Michael Murphy) leaving her for another, what-else-but much younger woman, and set out on the healing and hopeful path to reclaiming herself later in life. (While Clayburgh was in her mid-30s when Mazursky shot the movie, something about her feels older, wiser.) But “An Unmarried Woman” is also a sharp feminist text and richly lived-in-feeling portrait of New York City life.
Clayburgh’s superb performance, which was Best Actress-nominated at the 1979 Academy Awards after winning that prize at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, has a deft and deceptive lightness that gives Erica a sort of floating-through-life, almost gossamer quality that makes her at times tricky to read (and so therefore more fascinating to watch). It’s also extremely cathartic for the audience. Though Erica, an art dealer, eventually gets acquainted with Alan Bates as an abstract painter, “An Unmarried Woman” isn’t a romantic comedy in search of a match for its leading character. It’s a more naturalistic, minor-key character study that feels closer in spirit to an indie, landing on a great punchline of an ending as Erica trudges with a giant oversized painting in her arms down the streets of SoHo, a painting given to her by Bates’ artist.
That Erica refuses to settle for an alternate relationship is what makes the empowering “An Unmarried Woman” so remarkable and even groundbreaking today. But just imagine that take in the 1970s, barely a few years into Women’s Liberation. —RL
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In a decade that would dominate any list of Hollywood’s most iconic and enduring performances, Ellen Burstyn’s turn in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974) remains one of the most revolutionary. Under the direction of a young Martin Scorsese, Burstyn delivered a raw, emotionally charged performance that feels less like acting and more like life itself unfolding onscreen. It’s a portrait of female resilience that helped redefine what a “leading lady” could be in American cinema.
Burstyn plays Alice Hyatt, a recently widowed woman who packs up her life and hits the road with her young son, chasing the dream of becoming a singer while scraping by in a world that doesn’t make space for women like her. The film — part road movie, part character study — is grounded entirely in Burstyn’s layered, humane portrayal. She’s vulnerable, funny, furious, exhausted — often all in the same scene — and never once does it feel performative.
Burstyn fought to get this movie made, handpicking Scorsese after seeing his “Mean Streets,” and insisting on a more naturalistic, unvarnished take on a woman’s experience. The result is one of the most authentically female-centered studio films of the ’70s — and a performance that earned her a well-deserved Oscar.
What makes Burstyn’s Alice so compelling is her refusal to be boxed in by genre or archetype. She’s not a saint or a victim or a manic pixie dream girl, she’s just a woman trying to survive and maybe even thrive. In the process, Burstyn crafted one of the most fully realized characters of the New Hollywood era. “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” may be remembered as Scorsese’s early foray into female-driven storytelling, but it’s Burstyn’s film from start to finish, and her performance remains one of the decade’s most essential. —KE
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Justine, the main character played by Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, is damned and beautiful, luminous and dolorous, spiraling and serene. At the center of the haute-doomsday film about worst-case scenarios, Justine is frustrating at first and freed at last, a bottomless well of whatever all the while. “I brought my own slant,” Dunst told British Elle in 2011 about the role, “but I am very much portraying Lars’s experience of depression. We met before I did the movie and talked about how the light goes out of your eyes.”For a time, Dunst’s expressive, depressive performance in Melancholia was overshadowed by a looming, destructive anomaly of sorts—in the form of von Trier’s unwelcome, viral ramblings during a 2011 Cannes press conference. But in the years since, as audiences have visited or returned to the film, it’s Justine who has proved to be Melancholia’s enduring gravitational force. Dunst successfully dims her radiance for the good of this role. Still, you can easily see she’s a star. —Baker
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"It happened with regularity in the '70s, but every once in a while, a major studio accidentally produces a work of art like HE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD—a dark, iconoclastic Western that lacks clear heroes and villains, tucks its only shoot 'em up sequence in the opening reel, and closes on a note of profound ambiguity and regret. In look and tone, it recalls moody revisionist Westerns like MCCABE & MRS. MILLER and THE SHOOTING, but with a special attentiveness to the natural world that's closer to Terrence Malick. But perhaps its closest antecedent is Walter Hill's underrated WILD BILL, another story of an outlaw who had the misfortune of being a legend before his death, thus inviting fame-seekers to strike him down. Both films derive a sick sort of tension from the inevitable, as their paranoid anti-heroes wait for an end that they seem to know is coming." - Scott Tobias, A.V. Club
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"Song Kang-ho is one of the world’s greatest actors, as well as the muse of one of its greatest filmmakers: Bong Joon-ho. Song easily could have (and perhaps should have) also made our list for his performance in Bong’s masterful Memories of Murder. But the South Korean actor gained international fame for his role in the Oscar-winning Parasite, the first non–English language film to ever win Best Picture. And while it may not be as flashy as his turn as detective Park Doo-man in Memories of Murder, Song’s subtle performance as Kim Ki-taek in Parasite is just as impactful and may be an even more impressive feat of acting.
In Kim Ki-taek, Song transforms himself into a man who is hilariously—and even dangerously—frugal. He’ll go to absurd lengths to save money or make some quick cash, always searching for a new scheme to help lift his desperate family out of poverty. Parasite begins as a more lighthearted satire that centers on class inequality before descending into a full-blown thriller. It’s a wild and unexpected shift, one that is anchored by Song’s performance.
“This film starts with a story of average neighbors and builds to something extreme,” Bong told The Atlantic in 2019. “To cover that wide range, I thought Song Kang-ho would be the best to handle it. Especially in the climax; his character doesn’t have any lines—it’s the subtle changes in his muscles, the subtle tremors, that have to convince the audience of the entire film. Song has that strength as an actor.”
Song exhibits a full spectrum of emotions through simple, measured movements and changes in facial expressions, whether he’s silently reacting to the shame of hearing his employers discuss his distinct stench or he’s watching his basement home flood around him in hopeless, painful defeat. Parasite is an extraordinary film that The New York Times recently named the best movie of the 21st century, and Song is crucial to its groundbreaking success." —Chin
In Kim Ki-taek, Song transforms himself into a man who is hilariously—and even dangerously—frugal. He’ll go to absurd lengths to save money or make some quick cash, always searching for a new scheme to help lift his desperate family out of poverty. Parasite begins as a more lighthearted satire that centers on class inequality before descending into a full-blown thriller. It’s a wild and unexpected shift, one that is anchored by Song’s performance.
“This film starts with a story of average neighbors and builds to something extreme,” Bong told The Atlantic in 2019. “To cover that wide range, I thought Song Kang-ho would be the best to handle it. Especially in the climax; his character doesn’t have any lines—it’s the subtle changes in his muscles, the subtle tremors, that have to convince the audience of the entire film. Song has that strength as an actor.”
Song exhibits a full spectrum of emotions through simple, measured movements and changes in facial expressions, whether he’s silently reacting to the shame of hearing his employers discuss his distinct stench or he’s watching his basement home flood around him in hopeless, painful defeat. Parasite is an extraordinary film that The New York Times recently named the best movie of the 21st century, and Song is crucial to its groundbreaking success." —Chin
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"Zacharias Kunuk's first feature—as well as the first feature to be made in the Inuktitut language—is an epic account of an Inuit blood feud, shot on DV in northernmost Canada. Mysterious, bawdy, emotionally intense, and replete with virtuoso throat singing, this three-hour movie is engrossing from first image to last, so devoid of stereotype and cosmic in its vision it could suggest the rebirth of cinema. As the arctic light and landscape beggar description, so the performances go beyond acting, and the production itself seems little short of miraculous." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
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