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The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack, 2019) In 2009, James Benning premiered Ruhr, his first digital feature following nearly 40 years of work produced entirely on 16mm. Coming as it did at the tail end of the Aughts, after two-plus decades of hand-wringing over the slow proliferation of analog and then digital video formats in the world of experimental filmmaking, Ruhr seemed to mark the tipping point for the technology’s wider acceptance....

And, in case you missed it, be sure to check out Taubin’s interview with Jim Jarmusch, posted yesterday.

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The Internet’s Own Boy Having to fight past the crowd around the Subway Flatizza brainwave booth to make a screening of The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz puts a finer point on that schizophrenia. Brian Knappenberger’s documentary argues that the suicide of the man who helped spearhead anti-SOPA protests was the result of aggressive government lawyering in service of private-sector interests. It’s safe to say, without hyperbole, that the Internet wouldn’t be what it is today without Swartz’s contributions to the development of RSS (which was instrumental in the rise of blogging), Creative Commons licensing, or the social news site Reddit....

The Quiz Show Scandal Jang’s trademark is his dialogue: zippy repartee, smart wordplay, deliciously incongruous language in the mouths of hoods. Predictably, plenty of Korean critics have consequently accused his films of being “too theatrical”—but the fact is that his visual ideas and mise en scène are far more cinematic and inventive than anything you find in most Korean movies. Much of his work doesn’t fit standard genre templates, although he sometimes twists generic clichés in an amusingly subversive way....

Turtles Are Always Home Consensus had it that 2017 was an underwhelming year for cinema, a sentiment that seems to have seeped into conversations regarding the year in experimental film. Sweeping declarations tend to reflect a blinkered view of cinema, but wholesale value judgments of the year in the avant-garde feel particularly shortsighted in a field where the discourse is so strongly dictated by the vagaries of festival placement and subsequent critical appraisal....

A lightning rod for conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the controversial Catholic organization Opus Dei is associated in the minds of most Americans (i.e., those familiar with The Da Vinci Code) with a murderous, self-flagellating albino monk. For millions of the faithful, however, the group and its founder Josemaría Escrivá, dubbed “the saint of the ordinary” by John Paul II, act as an inspiration for bringing holiness into daily life....

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Mike Nichols was certified a genius at age 12 (as Michael Igor Peschowsky, b. 1931, a wartime refugee from Berlin) and became a show-business legend as early as his triumphant comedic teaming with Elaine May—which is to say, dating from the mid-Fifties (University of Chicago days) and culminating in 1960’s Broadway showcase An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May. He started directing for the stage in 1963, with Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, the first of many successes....