Entering the world of Gregg Araki's Teenage Apocalypse trilogy, one feels a long way from the mannered analyses and hushed tones of the university lecture hall. Initiated in 1993 with Totally Fucked Up, reprised in 1995 with The Doom Generation, and concluding with the 1997 cult classic Nowhere, the landscape of Teenage Apocalypse is utterly unrestrained: kinetic, libidinous, caustic, frenzied, and hallucinatory; by turns drenched and parched by the Los Angeles sun.

They Cloned Tyrone unravels like a paranoid conspiracy thriller, where obsessive observation and the discovery of sinister patterns leads to deeper mysteries and sleepless nights spent trying to decipher them. In the film, petty drug dealer Fontaine (John Boyega) stumbles upon a vast and bewildering government conspiracy targeting low-income Black communities and implicating nearly every aspect of consumer culture, from fried chicken restaurants to hair salons. Together with flamboyant pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and sprightly sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah…

In Deborah Stratman's Last Things—a dazzling, kaleidoscopic, and occasionally spooky consideration of geologic time—language and representation come up short. Throughout, Stratman invites us to consider the immensity of planetary evolution from the perspective of its most ancient, most enduring, but most humble of materials: elements, minerals, ores, stones.

In Still Film, the latest offering from experimental filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins, the unruliness of cinematic memory—full of half-remembered images, fabulated plot points, and heady nostalgic attachments—does battle with the evidentiary impulses of legal fact-finding.

Filmmakers and long-time artistic collaborators Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz are not the kind to take shortcuts. Unwilling to accept the artistic strings and ideological constraints that so often come along with state funding in their native Cuba, Cruz and Coyula have carved out an ardently, unsparingly independent path for their filmmaking.

Cinema and other forms of popular image culture have long been key tools in the making of colonial ideologies. By depicting far-off locales as tantalizing objects of desire, and by portraying Indigenous populations as exotic, backward, and out-of-step with the rhythms of modernity, cinema has often been a junior partner in the acquisitive and disposessive movements of colonial and imperial power.

You might call it a tale of two televisions. In his classic 1955 romantic melodrama All That Heaven Allows, German émigré filmmaker Douglas Sirk stages the lowest humiliation of his protagonist, Carrie (Jane Wyman), as an encounter with the televisual.