Film Quarterly is committed to blending fluency with intellectual ambition. Therefore we publish carefully wrought pieces of an intermediate length, shorter than academic articles but longer than typical magazine coverage, aiming to appeal to specialists and nonspecialists alike.

Attending film festivals involves a kind of ideological whiplash even more intense than does being a regular cinemagoer, if only because the contradictions are more compressed in space and time. The New York Film Festival’s promotional trailer, shown before every screening, says it all.

The first time—in 1958, during the original release — was not happy. Though the vertigo shot made my head spin deliciously, it furnished my only thrill; the otherwise impenetrable yarn, by turns too slow-moving for my interest or too fast-paced for my understanding, had to be repeatedly explained to me by my mother afterward

Who watches The Wire? It’s a truism that HBO’s sprawling five-season narrative of systemic dysfunction in Baltimore attracted fewer viewers—not to mention awards—than it deserved. That those whom it did attract often tended towards the evangelical did not always work in the show’s favor…

Dramatic fragmentation, John Gianvito, Lebanese Cinema, The Wire, and an interview with David Simon

READ: Make-Believe, Memory Failure, Post Festum, Vertigo, The Wire for Tourists?