The scant few images that occupy Duras’ L’homme atlantique eventually give way to overbearing black, a blank screen in which Duras’ narration tumbles into an endless abyss of non being. In doing so she proposes an idea that is as simple as it is radical: to depict death in cinema, cinema itself must die. The moving image is by its inherent nature limited to a very concrete, very human mode of understanding. As long as we use our eyes to…

Cinematically indistinguishable from a video game cutscene and almost a total repeat of the last one on a plot level all the way down to the kamikaze ship destruction/blue on blue guy death grudge match of the climax (Admittedly this time around with far more liberal helpings of arsonist BDSM death cults and deliberations on the moral validity of killing a child for the sake of preventing human colonial expansion???) All that said though I can’t help but enjoy the…

If the cinema is a major art with its own laws and language, what can it gain by submitting to the laws and language of another art? A great deal! And precisely to the extent to which, laying aside all its vain and puerile tricks, it is seriously concerned to subordinate itself and render a service. (…) The art of direction, the mechanics of which in relation to certain major films, as we have had to explain earlier, more even…

So what? Garland wants to make Come and See for the Trump era but the result is closer to a discount Call of Duty campaign. He undercuts himself at every turn. He wants to act as moralist but can’t help but take perverse pleasure in the spectacle of political violence. In a world increasingly fraught with bigotry and hatred, in a world that is currently witness to a genocide funded by American means, there is perhaps no more worthless position…