Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023) is deceptively soft to the touch. In adapting Priscilla Presley’s 1985 Elvis and Me memoir, the filmmaker brings an astonishing life story to the big screen, but also all of the beautiful, enviable objects that line the cage of celebrity. From luxurious Cadillacs to a lush array of sparkly designer dresses, accessorized with equally shiny handguns, these markers of luxury hum with palpable allure. At the same time, a sense of foreboding looms large. The opening shot lingers on the…

There’s maybe no working filmmaker more associated with film fashion than Sofia Coppola. But in this brief history of her super stylish body of work, we figure out the thematic stitching inside those perfect fits.

On a recent visit to Zagreb in Croatia, I was stopped in my tracks by this poster, above, in the Museum of Contemporary Art. It is a design for the First Science Fiction Fair held in 1972 in the museum’s previous incarnation as the Gallery of Contemporary Art. The poster’s artist, Mihajlo Arsovski, had been designing exhibition posters for the Gallery for more than a decade and this poster was awarded the Gold Medal at the International Poster Exhibition in Varese,…

Legend has it that the art of memory was born from death—when the ceiling of a Thessalian nobleman’s dining hall collapsed and killed all but Simonides of Ceos. He was able to identify his fellow guests, smooshed beyond recognition, by remembering their seat at the table, thus associating each person with a locality. The pre-Socratic poet soon began to experiment with localizing abstract ideas to objects in an imaginary house, which he could pick up one by one—each a symbol of…

When T.S. Eliot famously asked “Do I dare to eat a peach?” in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he was alluding to social and bodily anxiety, and the sticky traps that can ensnare the unsuspecting. Eliot’s J. Alfred finds a reason to be anxious about even the most mundane objects or situations—though eating in public (especially syrupy fruits) is a common anxiety. And while a peach should be an innocuous, enjoyable object, in practice a ripe peach can spontaneously…

The artist known as Plakiat, real name Maks Bereski, is one of a couple of incredibly talented poster designers currently spearheading a revival in the art of the Polish movie poster. The heyday of the Polish poster was from the early 1950s through the late 1980s, but the demise of Communism and the opening of borders brought about the end of a movement that used metaphor and surrealism as a form of subversion. In the age of the internet, however, appreciation…

WALL-E (2008) is just one in a growing tradition of films that depict artificial intelligence by anthropomorphizing it, an inclination that originated along with the concept. When the field was launched at a Dartmouth conference in 1956, the name was selected over alternatives like cybernetics, automata theory, and complex information processing because the notion of intelligence oriented machines toward a human metric—the conference’s organizer, John McCarthy, believed that the differences between human and machine tasks were merely “illusory.” Twenty years later,…

Oliver Sim is the star and co-writer of Yann Gonzalez's Hideous, now showing exclusively on MUBI in the series Brief Encounters. In this three-part queer horror movie, Sim is the main guest on a talk show that soon slides into a surreal journey of love, shame, and blood. The film also features songs from Sim’s debut album, Hideous Bastard.

By Saffron Maeve