Jack Smith in Star Spangled to Death (ca 1958)

 NOT TO MENTION DOGGED SELF-AGGREGATION!!!

Although sporadic updates may be found in “Events” and necessary modifications (plus relevant new material) will accrue to “Biography,” Das Blog mainly serves to link to material published in other venues, with new stuff featured on “The Home Page” [see below]

On Ken Jacobs at 80 [New York Times]

There are artists who burn out at 30 and others who, accelerating as they mature, begin to seem like forces of nature. One such force is Ken Jacobs. Read more…

On Shoah [Film Comment]

Every decade, Sight & Sound invites a multitude of critics to crowdsource the 10 greatest movies ever made. Three voted for Shoah in 1992; two joined them in 2012. Last year, in the aftermath of its 25th-anniversary re-release, Shoah received enough votes to tie Stalker for 29th place.  Read more…

On James Nares’s Street [NYRBlog]

James Nares’s Street, an engrossing and celebratory hour-long, oversized video projection of life in New York City, is a monument to evanescence. Read more…

On Spring Breakers and Girls [NYRBlog]

Spring Breakers, the new film by Harmony Korine, opens with an impressively staged shot of pure pulchritude—a mass of golden bodies gyrating on a Florida beach—rendered somewhat absurd by the cartoonish sounds of Skrillex’s wacky techno distortions. Read more...

On Room 237 [Tablet]

Even people who haven’t seen it know that The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel, is the scarific tale of a stir-crazy caretaker—Jack Nicholson, no less—driven mad by the ghosts haunting an isolated, off-season hotel… Read more…

On John Garfield [Tablet]
A half dozen years ago, while teaching a college class called “Jews & American Cinema: Outsiders In or Insiders Out?”, I asked each student to name the Jewish-American media figure they thought most prominent. Read more…

On Beyond the Hills [Artforum]

Cristian Mungiu’s new film, is in some ways the quintessential expression of the Romanian New Wave. Read more…

2013 REVIEWS: Old Dog . The Great Gatsby . Something in the Air . Post Tenebras Lux . Portrait of Jason . Un Flic . This Ain’t California. To the Wonder . Blancanieves . Le Pont du Nord . Beyond the Hills . Caesar Must Die .  The Gatekeepers . Hors Satan . Gangster Squad . San Diego Sunset. 

Late 2012: Tabu . Zero Dark Thirty . Django Unchained . Barbara . The Hobbit . Tchoupitoulos . Killing Them Softly. Beware of Mr. Baker . Hitchcock .  Silver Linings Playbook . Starlet .  Lincoln . The Master . Flight . The Loneliest Planet . Charlie is My Darling . The Flat . Holy Motors .

PRINT ONLY:  On Pablo Larrain and No, Harper’s (May); On Leviathan, Artforum (April); On Amour, Gebo and the Shadow, and Death-at-Work, Film Comment (January-February); On the Red Dawn remake, Film Comment (November-December); On Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Artforum (October); On Gabriel Over the White House, Film Comment (September-October); “Direct Cinema: Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight,” Artforum (September); “Cinema Obamarama,” Film Comment (July-August); “In Praise of Da Pasta,” Film Comment (May-June)

… and don’t forget the “Movie Journal” blog at Artinfo! Reports on the New York, Toronto, Tribeca film festivals & reviews going back to Spring 2012.