In this issue of Film Quarterly, four unusually lengthy works now available on DVD, which have a combined running time of forty hours, are reviewed. They range from poetic documentary to crime epic, but each is a work of the utmost distinction

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007) is an entrancing movie. Cate Blanchett is a fine actor. As one of the six Dylans—“Jude Quinn,” the star at his shimmering, recalcitrant zenith—Blanchett hazards a daring performance, peaking in the Fellini-dreaming encounter with David Cross’s Allen Ginsberg.

Writers have been ingenious and creative in generating online content. Uploaded on 13 November, “Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer” featured a report of the type normally delivered on the show by Jon Stewart, but in this case recorded by a writer at a desk in front of the New York picket lines.

Many viewers and reviewers rehearsed a familiar anxiety about Todd Haynes’s fantasia on Bob Dylan, I’m Not There. How much do you have to know, going in, to be an ideal viewer of this film? Do you have be a lifelong fan, a Dylan-ologist, a child of the 1960s? A student of semiotics, as the director once was?

Godard, Bereavement films, Ominous dramas, The Wire, Parisian cinema, frame-capturing, and film culture in Rome

READ: Easy Words, The End, Cyperpicketing, and American Mess