Gabriel Winslow-Yost

As You Like It

Sam Barlow’s video games may be the first efforts at interactive cinema—by either a game designer or a filmmaker—that work.

I, Coppola

Megalopolis, the director’s first film in thirteen years, is a useful reminder of how inimical extreme wealth is to democratic thinking—and to clear thinking in general. 

A ‘Primal Paper Forest’

In the first decade of his career, the artist CF seemed to be reinventing comics from first principles, assembling strange new worlds only to smash them into pieces.

Cross-Country Tripping

“Even before I ever drove, I was in some sense connected to this resonance with road-tripping by proxy, through the archetypes in literature and cinema, just as I’d become interested in the desert west before I ever got there.”

More Real Than Life

In Jane Schoenbrun’s films, personal metamorphosis happens on both sides of the screen. 

Out of Time

Bill Watterson’s first book since Calvin and Hobbes envisions a medieval world on the brink of extinction.

‘This Is Not Your Grave’

A new graphic novel by Nick Drnaso lingers in the desire for change while Tommi Parrish’s latest focuses on the hard work of actually making change happen.

‘To Leave This World’

In his recent trilogy of films, Paul Schrader uses his signature device—a man in a room, arguing with himself—to study society’s sins. 

Love’s Body Count

In HBO’s The Last of Us, violence never implicates the viewer as it did the player.

No Surprises

The comedian Nathan Fielder’s new HBO show is an expensive, painstakingly constructed machine for managing uncertainty.

Compulsion, Triumph, Regret, and Unease

“Video games have access to compulsion—that kind of deep-seated slot-machine feeling—and the mindless cleaning-up-the-kitchen zone-out in a way that other art forms don’t.”

Exhausting All Possibilities

The video game The Stanley Parable is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.

Sketching an Uncertain Future

Eleanor Davis is one of the very best cartoonists working today.

Somnolent Thailand

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film Cemetery of Splendor, the most nakedly political film of Weerasethakul’s career, is a gentle, open-hearted story of human connection, underlain at every moment by rage and dread.

Video Games: The Secret Life

How games work and what they can mean

Russia's Darkest Filmmaker

The wonder about late Russian filmmaker Alexei German’s Hard to Be a God is not that it took so long to make, it’s that it got made at all.

Comics in the Trenches

Jacques Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches is one of the most passionately bleak works in the history of comics.

Parasites in Eden

“I draw a lot of weird doodles on scraps of paper,” says the Canadian cartoonist Jesse Jacobs—true of most cartoonists, no doubt. But few cartoonists’ work is as suffused with the spirit of the doodle as Jacobs’s.

The Joys of ‘Mere’

One of the joys of Mere, the new book by the cartoonist C.F., is how thoroughly it resists categorization, or even basic explanation.

A Mind Among Pigs

While we have some idea of what is going on in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, we have no idea how we’re supposed to feel about it.