Aliens exist. At least, they do for Steven Spielberg. This has remained constant across a career defined by restless movement. Spielberg has spent 60 years making films about different subjects, and just as long returning to the same questions.  This fascination reaches back to 1964 in Phoenix, Arizona, when Firelight, Spielberg’s largely lost amateur debut, screened once to a few hundred locals.…

They spoke the same language but could not understand each other. Featured [in the Art Theatre of Long Beach and City Fabrick's Designing Resistance film week] alongside films about protest, architecture, and the ways artists confront authoritarian power, Metropolis occupies a strange place in this conversation. Few films have rendered oppression so vividly or visualized the crushing weight of…

“I think it would be fun to run a newspaper,” Hollywood’s boy wonder, Orson Welles, casually quips in Citizen Kane. He is about to discover that controlling information means controlling reality, and he will wield it like an infinity stone. He will not report the news—he will author it. Manufacturing public feeling, identifying enemies, galvanizing heroes, and deciding who and what the country…

It is happening again. It is happening again. The now iconic phrase first uttered on a Thursday night in 1990. Now repeated ad nauseam through Lynch-coded memes on social media, it first represented the return of a great darkness. A cry for help buried deep inside of David Lynch’s magnum opus. It is happening again. It is happening again. The evil has found its way back. Fritz Lang did not leave…

A summary of three post-screening Q&As with writer and comedian Stephen Hibbert at the Art Theatre of Long Beach for the fortieth anniversary of Pulp Fiction. Stephen was, and still is, a friend of Quentin Tarantino. When Tarantino was searching for an actor to play the wordless but crucial role in his sophomore film of a gimp kept in a sadistic pawn shop owner’s basement, he called Stephen, The…