Avatar: Fire and Ash is now in theaters, so it's as good a time as any to re-plug my article on high frame rate projection

GSO Spotlight Program We’re thrilled to introduce a new initiative! If you’ve recently been published, completed your dissertation, received an award, or have other exciting news to share, we want to highlight you. Submissions can be made here: forms.gle/dpyQDLCoNKtL...

Seven straight Warner Bros. pictures earned over $40 million on their opening weekends. Warner Bros. led the Golden Globes noms. It's having one of the best years critically and financially in its history. Why is it auctioning itself off? The answer explains a lot about the modern economy.

Greatly enjoyed reading Ramzi Fawaz's essay on Andor in the new issue of Film Quarterly, where he shrewdly argues that the series "sits resolutely within the history of global revolutionary media." doi.org/10.1525/fq.2...

Joint Statement of the Acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Netflix.

Wow... One of the formative movie theaters of my childhood in the Twin Cities colliding with the formative movie theater of my college years in Chicago!

Super stoked that our panel on independent film exhibition was accepted! 🎉 See you all in Chicago in a few months!

(GDT's Frankenstein is the best movie I'm seen so far this year and deserves to be seen in theaters. Achingly personal, staggeringly archetypal. Seen it twice and sobbed both times)

Summer from Vivaldi's Four Seasons at the end of Portrait of a Lady on Fire comes to mind

RIP actor & Chicago native Ron Dean. He interrogated Dr. Richard Kimble in THE FUGITIVE, he dropped Andy off at detention in THE BREAKFAST CLUB, he was shot by Harvey Dent in THE DARK KNIGHT, he was Marty Crane's poker buddy on FRASIER, and so much more.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

That’s gotta really hurt. (And I am stunned.)

Writers Guild protest is starting now at the Disney gate in Burbank….

Now available digitally: muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/articl...

Twas sadly never going to win for series, but very happy Andor's superb writing was acknowledged. Hope this persuades some folks to get over the Star Wars of it all and give the show a go

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

Publication day! Just got the new issue of Film History in the mail, which includes my article on high frame rate projection and the way contingent formats get held up as inviolable aesthetic norms. Certainly a good way to welcome the new school year!

In light of Vanity Fair's recent idiotic decision, WaPo's offering its veteran critic a buyout, the NYT's "reassigning" three arts writers critics, etc., a lot of us are talking about the public's (and thus publications') lack of interest in criticism. It's part of a larger pattern of a war...

An AI slop factory apparently tried to rewrite our article about AI not replacing workers en masse, but hit the paywall... so just summarised the paywall. If this is the robot that takes my job I'll be v embarrassed

I'm becoming a reading annotation evangelist with my summer class. I've assigned the intro to Noble's Algorithms of Oppression a few times and never gotten very good discussions out of it. Incentivizing student reading with these required annotations has produced some super animated reactions!

WGA coming in hot

WHOA. The frog, she is boiled.

I was irked by yesterday's Emmy noms and then I remembered that Industry S3 was eligible and now I'm even more irked by yesterday's Emmy noms

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb. I've been working on and off for the last year on a side project about the way specialty film production and exhibition formats contributed to a larger project of making a spectacle of the bomb... 🧵

Rewatched North By Northwest last night and was of course thinking about me and @davidkocik.bsky.social 's favorite Simpsons cutaway: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yutf...

Pretty clear that this will be the vehicle SCOTUS will use to deny equal protection to transgender people. While the case will be about sports, that decision would essentially strip all rights on transgender status or sex for trans people. It would make virtually any law permissible.

A bizarro recent archive find: Movie theaters can be built to withstand nuclear bombs!

Is @ptklein.com okay??

This one's pretty appalling: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Daily life in 2025. #AI #Tech #JustLetMeBe #FFS

Check out our story in @blockclubchi.bsky.social to find out more: blockclubchicago.org/2025/05/29/m...

The Last of Us s2 is basically a case study in the perils of adaptation. Some stories are just too structurally and mechanically specific to their original medium to be ported elsewhere

Despite horribly ahistorical framing (IMAX's footprint has steadily grown since 2008), this is a largely harmless piece. Can't help but get a little boost of energy from seeing this show up in the Times just as I'm finishing up a diss. chapter on the issue! www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/b...

Caught the new Mission: Impossible last night, which is obviously bloated and overly self-serious but after a messy first act I couldn't help but have a fun time. The biplane chase is spectacular. Ethan Hunt is canonically from Madison, WI.

I've been finishing up a chapter draft and was thinking about this comment Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder made in a New Yorker interview a few years back. One of the best bits of writing advice I've gotten

Guess I was a trendsetter by always still calling it HBO Max (this is so deeply stupid) variety.com/2025/tv/news...

I don't think we can fight AI creep by weaponizing grades. Nobody learns anything if we decide our job is to be plagiarism mall cops. If we don't win this argument at the level of process, convincing students they CAN'T learn what we have to teach them if they outsource to AI, we won't win at all.

Could it be?? Noooo haha. Unless.....?

Huge congratulations to my dear friend and colleague @davidkocik.bsky.social on passing his dissertation defense! 🥳 Well deserved Dr. Kocik!

Had a great time hosting the 2nd Midwest Graduate Film and Media Studies Symposium this weekend! Was so glad to have such a sharp, fun, energetic group of scholars at UWM

Seated for the Drawing (In)Attention symposium, chaired by @cinematthew.bsky.social!

Happening tomorrow!

Historians: Quibbling Over Exact Definition Of Concentration Camp Sign Of Healthy Society

Life has been a whirlwind lately so I haven't had much time or motivation to bake, but I just took these guys out of the oven this morning

Finished watching Andor with my partner last night ahead of season 2 (my 3rd time, her 1st). Stepped away thinking (1) that it's still by far the best new television show of the 2020s and (2) that its dense and textured depiction of a burgeoning resistance movement hits far harder under Trump 2.0

I'm gutted that this is happening everywhere, even a small state school like UW Milwaukee. International students were already vulnerable before this too. Universities, if you're going to nickel and dime your students, at the very least publicly fight for their rights www.wuwm.com/education/20...

Recovering from a fun weekend at #scms25 and shifting focus to the next event: The 2025 Midwest Graduate Film and Media Studies Symposium is in just two weekends, with keynote talk from sound studies scholar Neil Verma!

Barely made it on the train but @cinematthew.bsky.social and I are heading on down to #scms25! Let's gooooo!

Looking forward to #scms25 later this week!