Crimes of the Future
-
Cinema Is Dead and We’re All Its Ghosts: 2022 at the Movies
“User-generated content” is the future of the moving image, and the present as well. A less sentimental look back at 2022 in film would probably take the measure of TikTok trends, Instagram Reels, Twitch streams, YouTube reaction videos and OnlyFans porn. Before cinema dies, you see the Ring Video Doorbell surveillance footage repackaged, America’s Funniest Cops–style, in the syndicated Ring Nation, which premiered this year (coproduced by Ring and MGM Television, both subsidiaries of Amazon). The overwhelming proliferation of digital images, recorded by consumer-grade digital cameras with ever-greater resolution, storage capacity, and ubiquity, is the story of the century. Such […]
by Mark Asch on Dec 19, 2022 -
Inside Out: Michael Almereyda and David Cronenberg in Conversation on Crimes of the Future
“There is an inner life to a human being that can be as dangerous as any animal in the forest.” So asserts David Cronenberg in his supremely self-aware book-length 1993 interview Cronenberg on Cronenberg, tracking a career that has supplied us with indelible nightmare images: ravenous parasites, murderous mutant children, an exploding head, a slimy gun extracted from a pseudo-vaginal slit in a man’s abdomen—to name a conspicuous few. Recalling the early films, it’s almost easy to forget that the jolting imagery emerges from compelling atmospheres of isolation and estrangement. Cronenberg’s reliable quotient of ghastly mayhem has always roared up […]
by Michael Almereyda on Jul 14, 2022 -
Cannes 2022: De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Crimes of the Future, Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, Les Amandiers
The man sitting two seats over had averted his eyes from the screen a few times before he finally hit his breaking point. I saw a penis and a drill of some kind coming right for the urethra and heard a doctor saying that he was going to put the device on the “Kalashnikov setting.” What, I wondered, might that mean? When the drill started pumping away and blood spurted, the poor guy had had enough and exited swiftly, and I absolutely couldn’t blame him. This was the second screening of the instantly infamous De Humani Corporis Fabrica that day; after the […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 25, 2022
