The Brooklyn Rail

BOYS TO MEN
Friends with Benefits at Film Society of Lincoln Center

By James N. Kienitz Wilkins

The boys’ room, where it all began. After class, they’d gather between the sinks and the stalls in a sordid teen pisshole turned echo chamber of ideas—four friends harmonizing in a perfect acoustical environment, inventing that singular sound which would catapult them to greatness and riches beyond their wildest dreams: mellifluous contemporary fusion riding on four vocal leads.

DON’T LOOK BACK
Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years

By Erica Peplin

The ghost stories of Henry James weren’t about ghosts. They were the residue of tortured psyches, the ethereal embodiments of our deepest fears. As James described them, ghosts were “the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.”

MODERN TIMES
Dreams Rewired

By David Fresko

In 1937, the young American author Delmore Schwartz published the short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” a terrifying scenario of existential eradication. In it, an unnamed protagonist recounts a dream where he finds himself in a cinema watching a film that depicts his youthful parents coming together as a couple.

Border Crossings

By Paul Felten

You’d be hard-pressed to find a contemporary filmmaker more searching or mercurial than Claire Denis; her films aren’t unclassifiable, exactly, but they inevitably frustrate attempts at description that favor story, character, or identity politics.

In Conversation

ADAM & ZACK KHALIL with Leo Goldsmith

The title of Ojibway filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil’s debut feature is INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls./]—which is a pretty good up-front indicator that this is going to be something other than a straightforward educational documentary.