78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
In 78 setups and 52 cuts, the deliriously choreographed two-minute shower sequence in Psycho ripped apart cinema’s definition of horror. With a shocking combination of exploitation and high art, Alfred Hitchcock upended his own acclaimed narrative structure by violently killing off a heroine a third of the way through his film, without explanation, justification, or […]
Author: The JT Leroy Story
JT LeRoy, gender-fluid child of a West Virginia prostitute, burned brightly like the transgressive love child of Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote. Feuerzeig (The Devil & Daniel Johnston) strikes gold again in the film’s central character, a literary wunderkind in the late ‘90s with an obsessive penchant for self-documentation and the ability to brilliantly exploit […]
Bathtubs Over Broadway
Becoming Cousteau
Adventurer, filmmaker, innovator, author, unlikely celebrity and conservationist: For over four decades Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his explorations under the ocean became synonymous with a love of science and the natural world. As he learned to protect the environment, he brought the whole world with him— he sounded alarms more than 50 years ago about the […]
Beuys
Chasing Coral
Coral reefs are the nursery for all life in the oceans, a remarkable ecosystem that sustains us. Yet with carbon emissions warming the seas, a phenomenon called “coral bleaching”—a sign of mass coral death—has been accelerating around the world, and the public has no idea of the scale or implication of the catastrophe silently raging […]
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
Can you imagine a motorway ploughing through Manhattan? And that SoHo doesn’t exist? This is easily how things might have ended up, had the author and activist Jane Jacobs not fought for her beloved hometown of New York. In the 1950s and 60s, when the property magnate Robert Moses was exerting his powerful influence, Jacobs […]
Coded Bias
Modern society sits at the intersection of two crucial questions: What does it mean when artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly governs our liberties? And what are the consequences for the people AI is biased against? When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that most facial-recognition software does not accurately identify darker-skinned faces and the faces […]
Feels Good Man
In 2005, artist Matt Furie posted a cartoon strip to Myspace starring four stoner friends—Andy, Brett, Landwolf, and Pepe. Inspired by impish humor and boyhood mischief, Furie’s story about a little frog who likes to pee-pee with his pants down became wildly popular on new social media platforms such as 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter. As […]
Flee
FLEE tells the story of Amin Nawabi as he grapples with a painful secret he has kept hidden for 20 years, one that threatens to derail the life he has built for himself and his soon to be husband. Recounted mostly through animation to director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, he tells for the first time the […]