"Okay, here's the plot."

"From here on out complete silence."

De Palma is breathing cinema, thinking in and feeling every image and sound. The characters are playing for and conduits to the meta-cinematic concerns of an audience of one, whose own functions have been included in the film itself. Further, it seems for BDP the theatre is not an objective space of viewership in which the film is seen but an additional actor to perform and be performed in the…

consent not to be a single being. Narratively and visually sides with voluntarist philosophy, the actus purus of the One. “My name is Neo.” But never far from sight, subtly layered, are the relations—implicit and explicit—that underlie this innate capacity, this always already being what you are(n't). The choice to be what one is never without the intersections of all sorts that make possible the choice: it is at once the choice to die that makes possible this being and…

The existence of Justice League, in the form that the world has seen it, cannot be understood without the reaction to Batman v Superman (BvS) as context. At the heart of this reaction lies Armond White’s basically correct diagnoisis that the “culture has lost appreciation for the true aesthetics of cinema”. He further develops his point by arguing that this is a condition that has been preyed upon by artless studios to the point that those to whom a film…

There's a certain overstatement in the elucidation of Doctor Strange's successes, as one might find them here and elsewhere. The chief and only truly justifiable ambition that could be attributed to the film is its visual style. For when, on the few occasions that Strange really does something (e.g. when it folds a city about itself, or has a building eat a person), it is surely at its most interesting.

Yet, this particular ambition—and calling it an ambition is generous…