Dev Patel in David Lowery’s The Green Knight, 2021. Photo: Eric Zachanowich. Courtesy of A24 Films.

The Green Knight offers all the thrilling props a Camelot geek could want: deep-hooded cloaks and pointy headdresses, thatch-roofed hovels and dim stone halls, blue rune tattoos and prayers to the Virgin Mary that seem awfully close to goddess worship. There is wattle, there is daub, and there is an enviable tunic bedazzled in silver votives. Together, all of it forms a dreamlike reflection of a fraught relationship between Christian and Celtic moralities, human beings and the rest of nature. Fans of Loreena McKennitt, Thomas Hardy, and William Cronon, this one’s for you. —Jane Breakell  Read More

Still from Season 3 of Caveh Zahedi’s The Show about the Show. Courtesy of Zahedi.

Many artists are in some sense cannibals, but the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi takes it further than most. The initial premise of his brilliantly deranged series The Show about the Show was that each episode would be about the making of the one before it (so Episode 1 follows Zahedi’s travails in selling the show’s pilot, Episode 2 reveals what went wrong behind the scenes of Episode 1, and so on). When a moment hadn’t been caught on camera, he’d ask everyone to re-create it; if someone refused to repeat the embarrassing thing they’d said, he’d cast an actor to play them instead. The recursive formula broke down with Season 2, which focuses on the demise of Zahedi’s marriage, thanks to his maniacal exploitation of it during Season 1 (the divorce negotiations required that he replace his children with animations on The Show). It’s all fascinating to watch—like social media in reverse, where everything a normal person wants to hide is on seemingly unfiltered display. Zahedi now has nine days left on Kickstarter to raise enough money to finish seasons 3 and 4, and for ten thousand dollars, he’s prepared to make a short film about you; viewers of the first two seasons might feel we’d pay nearly that much to stay off-screen. —Lidija Haas  Read More

Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father, 1974, latex, plaster, wood, fabric, and red
light. Collection Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

The exhibition rooms on the second floor of the Jewish Museum are densely shadowed and cavernous, the scant light artificial and angular. In one, the mouth of a veined brown marble fireplace hangs open, eating air. It’s an apt setting for the exhibition “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter,” which traces the artist’s fraught relationship to psychoanalysis, including her reactions to her own thirty-three years of treatment. Journal entries, dream fragments recorded on scraps of paper, fabric works, the iconic Passage Dangereux (1997), Destruction of the Father (1974), and Ventouse (Cupping Jar) (1990) constitute only a portion of the show. A cluster of Bourgeois’s writings speak to her relationship to sadism, fear, self-destruction. But I wasn’t surprised to find myself orbiting the texts swollen with guilt, anger: “A germ of rage cohabits like the germ of TB, it lives in you.” I could have spent an entire heliophobic day trying to make out Bourgeois’s handwritten notes, which slip between pictorial and linguistic representations just as fluidly as they shift from English to French. I’ll be back before September 12, when the show closes. —Jay Graham  Read More

“Ptolemy with a falcon,” from Der naturen bloeme by Jacob van Maerlant

When you go on a first date, do you struggle to make conversation? Read Morris Bishop’s The Middle Ages, a popular history from 1968, and your troubles are over. Did you know that if you failed to attempt to return a lost falcon to its rightful owner, flesh was cut from your breast and fed to the falcon? Did you know that there was plastic surgery, with noses, lips, and ears enlarged via skin graft? Did you know that to become a Master of Grammar at Cambridge, you had to prove that you were skilled at beating students by hiring a boy and hitting him with a birch rod, with a beadle as your witness? Did you know that, at the same time, there were rules against the hazing of freshmen? One statute from Germany: “Each and every one attached to this University is forbidden to offend with insult, torment, harass, drench with water or urine, throw on or defile with dust or any filth, mock by whistling, cry at with a terrifying voice, or dare to molest in any way whatsoever… any who come to this town and to this fostering University for the purpose of study.”—Benjamin Nugent Read More

Still from Alicia Scherson’s Il Futuro, 2013. Courtesy of Strand Releasing.

A film I often come back to and that I think everyone should see is Il Futuro (2013), by the Chilean director Alicia Scherson. It’s based on A Little Lumpen Novelita, one of my favorite novels by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer and published by New Directions in 2014. The book is about Bianca, orphaned in her teens by a car crash, and the life of crime she and her brother begin to lead soon after. Starring Manuela Martelli and the late Rutger Hauer, Scherson’s film conveys Bianca’s new sense of reality in scenes of dark, destabilizing eroticism, and sometimes warmth and levity. Scherson’s film adaptation of Bolaño’s novel The Third Reich is also in the works, titled 1989. —Amina Cain  Read More