Mark Fisher reviews Steve McQueen’s bleak, blank tale of New York addiction and emptiness, starring Michael Fassbender, Shame.

Nina Power and Rob White discuss the politics and aesthetics of Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world drama, Melancholia.

Since Marey’s motion studies at the end of the nineteenth century, film has been a tool for providing visible evidence, a record of things seen. The development of digital imaging technology over the past twenty years has transformed that original empirical function.

Summer in Paris and, so we are told, the city closes down. And indeed the excellent Cinémathèque, with its theater, museum, and archive, is shuttered for the whole of August. But my visit brings a chance to see those seasonal releases that never make it to Cannes (much less to foreign festivals), the genre movies to which locals flock, heedless of awards and international distribution.

Early in Fast Five, charismatic Han (Sung Kang) arrives in Rio de Janeiro, recruited Ocean’s Eleven-style to play a role in an elaborate heist. Though fans of the series will no doubt be delighted to see him, they may be perplexed when they recall that he met an unambiguous death in previous installment The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. His persistence is a mystery, like that of the generally heavy-handed and lead-footed franchise itself.

Though it has nine main segments, one for each year recorded, The Black Power Mixtape can be described as a kind of three-act tragedy. The first phase is one of radical eloquence and increasingly bold, militant organization.

FEATURES: Interviews with Alice Rohrwacher, Miranda July, Pawel Wojtasik, John Akomfrah, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan; and reviews of The Interrupters and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

READ: Interview with Göran Hugo Olsson, Fall and Rise, Misfits, Out of Sight