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The Day YouTube Wept: Marcus Batto’s Found-Footage Memorial to Michael Jackson
There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night
A day in the life of the internet is impossible to reconstruct as a feature film. The pace of the scroll is too quick; any given snapshot is too algorithmically myopic to be comprehensive. There’s too much that evades notice, and still more that evades preservation. With the slow obsolescence of search engines—lost first to advertisements, then to optimization, and now to artificial intelligence—our digital past gets blurrier still. With There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night, Marcus Batto attempts the impossible, reconstructing June 25, 2009, the day of Jackson’s death, exclusively through the found footage available online. Batto, 31 years old, is an artist, archivist, programmer, and something of a YouTube ethnographer. “Growing up,” he says, “I wanted to… Read more
Point of No Return: Digital Nostalgia in Backrooms
Backrooms (2026)
Like the internet lore for which it is named, Backrooms (2026) encapsulates a paradox of embodiment and time. Kane Parsons’s feature film—an adaptation of his cult YouTube series of the same title—has its origins in a photograph of a former furniture store undergoing renovations in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken in 2003 and uploaded to 4chan in 2019. This unlikely source became the starting point for a diffuse, Lovecraftian latticework of anonymous mythmaking and creepypasta, whose locus eventually migrated to Reddit, where it split into separate communities of originalists and revisionists. Their prolific output is a striking example of hypermodern digital creativity predicated on the surreal anachronism of physical spaces that predate the advent of Web 2.0, tinged by curdled nostalgia for a less… Read more
Bleak Week, C’est Chic
Come and See (1985)
The inaugural season of the American Cinematheque series Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair took place in 2022, a cheeky stab at some summertime counter-programming. Its diverse lineup was aimed, as per the Cinematheque’s website, at spotlighting “filmmakers who wholly embrace a cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy.” Indeed, in the festival’s first 33 film–strong slate of repertory classics like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Come and See (1985), Winter Light (1963), Funny Games (1997), Breaking the Waves (1996), and Sátántangó (1994), this visceral quality was front and center as an organizing principle, even if the films weren’t united by much besides their baseline dreariness and arthouse bonafides. Now entering its fifth and most curatorially focused iteration, Bleak Week has grown from a local phenomenon into a… Read more
Widow’s Bay and the Genre Jump Scare
Widow's Bay
In recent years, a trend has emerged in horror: auteurs have moved into the genre after first establishing themselves in sketch comedy. In 2018, Jordan Peele of Key & Peele won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Get Out, his feature directorial debut (which he would follow up with 2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope). This year, Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress for her devious turn in the horror film Weapons, the second feature from Zach Cregger (after 2022’s Barbarian), a founding member of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know. There’s clearly a connection between comedy and horror. Both genres succeed by getting a response—a laugh or a jump—out of an audience member. And there have been countless films that straddle both genres, like An American Werewolf in… Read more
Cannes: Devils May Care
All of a Sudden
Cannes, while a real privilege to attend, is also a gauntlet—a marathon of viewing and socializing—and I’ve reached the point where my eyes have begun to droop and my head has started to throb. But there’s still work to be done! I’m here on behalf of the Asia Society, a global network of centers dedicated to deepening understanding between Asia and the rest of the world. We have a beautiful 258-seat theater at our museum building on the Upper East Side of New York, and my remit is to seek out new releases and repertory films that might eventually grace its screen. My most anticipated movie of the festival was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden. I’m pleased to say it… Read more
Cannes: Premium Diesel
The Fast and The Furious
It’s one of my closely held festival precepts that the odds of seeing a great film are much improved by making a beeline for the restorations and revivals. These are films that have endured beyond just one turn of the festival hamster wheel, their merits as art or artifact more or less established. Although a festival is first and foremost a showcase of things new and notable, sometimes the thought of enduring another two-plus hours of likely tepid drama is too much to countenance, and only a surefire prospect will do.That is why, despite the incredulity of my more seasoned yet still less cynical colleagues, I felt compelled last Wednesday to upend my circadian rhythms for the Cannes midnight showing… Read more
