In the brisk, 43-minute anthology film, Cinema-19, a group of experimental filmmakers respond to the coronavirus pandemic with diverse and imaginative results. The films are all 190 seconds long and, say the curator/organizers, filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Adam Sekuler, “do not attempt to summarize the pandemic, but instead focus on the personal, the political, the sensual, the distant, the abstract, and the absurd.” Highlights include Courtney Stephen‘s poetic essay film on irises, hundreds of which she encountered on walks in the five-mile radius she and her mother were confined to during quarantine. (“This is a trick,” she says in voiceover. […]

In what looks like a bit of a spiritual sequel to Somewhere — if you add a couple or more  decades to each of the characters — Bill Murray plays a womanizing dad concerned about the possibly adulterous activities of his daughter’s husband (Marlon Wayans) in Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks. Rashida Jones plays the disbelieving daughter in a picture sure to bring the feels for the beauty of a pre-pandemic New York City. The film is forthcoming as the first venture between Apple TV+ and A24 and will be in theaters and online in October.

Brooklyn-based designer Lydia Cambron — whose commercial work focuses on retail environments and who is fascinated, according to her website, “in the narrative ability of products and objects” — has used her quarantine days to make a witty and poignant one-woman/one-apartment homage to the final sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. From Cambron: 2020: an isolation odyssey is a reenactment of the iconic finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Restaged in the context of home quarantine, the journey through time adapts to the mundane dramas of self-isolation–poking fun at the navel-gazing saga of life alone and indoors. This […]

Kirby Ferguson, who landed on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2011 following this Everything is a Remix web series, is back with a new work that explains the QAnon phenomenon and places it in larger political context. For anyone who found themselves Googling “Marjorie Taylor Greene” this morning (Or was perhaps mystified by a colleague’s late-night email screed), the video offers a bit of a primer on the internet phenomenon as well as analysis. As Jason Kottke summarizes at Kottke.org, Ferguson sees QAnon as a form of magical thinking, breaking down six specific characteristics: 1. Obsession with symbols and […]

Director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and brother Olivier, who previously worked together on music videos like the Chemical Brothers’s “Star Guitar,” have just released a new quarantine-made clip for the Bristol band IDLES. Using a blend of lo-fi animation (Michel’s cardboard cutouts shot by a suspended-overhead iPhone) and CGI (Olivier’s desktop wizardry), the clip, which suggests a Richard Scarry adaptation of Animal Farm, moves from a racist village to the moon. From an article on the video at WePresent: The song is really about the dangerous small-mindedness born out of villages which can sometimes act as […]

A long, progressively disorienting drive across a snow-battered landscape leads to a relationship milestone — meeting the parents — in the latest from writer/director Charlie Kaufman. For Jessie Buckley’s unnamed girlfriend character, Jake (Jesse Plemmons) is someone promising even as the film’s serenely despondent title functions as her mantra-like internal dialogue. Awaiting in a house that seems unmoored by time are Jake’s mom and dad, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. Said Kaufman to Entertainment Weekly, “The house represents the imagined interaction between someone you bring home to your parents — that panic that is twoheaded at that point. […]