James Slaymaker is a journalist, researcher, and filmmaker. His articles have been published in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, MUBI Notebook, Little White Lies, McSweeney’s, Kinoscope, The Interactive Film and Media Journal, and others. His first book is Time Is Luck: The Life and Cinema of Michael Mann (Telos Publishing, 2022). His films have been featured on Fandor, MUBI, and The Film Stage, as well as screening at the London DIY Film Festival, the Concrete Dream Film Festival, the InShort Film Festival, and The Straight Jacket Film Festival. He has a PhD from the University of Southampton, where his research focused on digital technology, the essay film, and collective memory. He is currently in the process of developing it into a monograph. His latest book is Essay Cinema in the Digital Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). 
Directors · Essays · Experimental & Underground · French Cinema
Carax suggests that the constant availability of images as immaterial streams – reduced to binary code and accessible through handheld devices – has diminished their impact. One of the film’s[…]
Biopic · Business · Men & Masculinity · Sports
If Ferrari is arguably Mann’s most flawed protagonist, he is also one of his most tragic – fully sold to a system that requires him to develop an almost inhuman[…]
Asian · Drama · Experimental & Underground
The reflexive nature of Hong’s formalism, in which stylistic decisions call attention to themselves and point to the mediating presence of the man behind the camera, makes it problematic to[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Drama · Labor
“There can be no resistance without memory or universalism” – Jean-Luc Godard, In Praise of Love (2001) * * * With his new feature, The Old Oak (2023), Ken Loach[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · French Cinema · New Genres · New Media
This impression of the look being “renewed” through the radical potential of video to sharpen one’s perception is vital to the core philosophy at the centre of Here and Elsewhere,[…]
Biopic · Directors · Experimental & Underground · War · Writers & Critics
I’m not interested in what happened next; I’m interested in what happens emotionally next. It’s like memory. Memory isn’t linear. It’s cyclical. A tiny thing can be the thing that’s[…]
Just as Holy Motors simultaneously mourned the loss of physicality from filmmaking while embracing the creative possibilities offered by digital technology, Annette is built on a seeming paradox: it plunges[…]
Experimental & Underground · Horror · New Media · Societal Trends · Theory · Thrillers & Action · TV & Streaming
The encounter between the lead characters and The Circle evokes a wider sense of anxiety regarding the extent to which we upload information about every area of our lives into[…]
Comedy · Film Technology & History · Franchises & Series · Theory
Stereoscopic experience, therefore, drastically alters the positioning of the viewer in relation to diegetic content, creating the illusion that the body of the spectator is immersed within the screen planes[…]
Drama · New Media · Philosophy
[This review contains spoilers for the films Glass and The Village.] “There are unknown forces that don’t want us to realise what we are truly capable of. They don’t[…]
In Sparrow, this sense of melancholia manifests as an abstract nostalgia for the architecture and cultural values of an old Hong Kong that is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by[…]
Film Technology & History · Historical & Epic
Through its complex use of multiple depth planes, deep-focus compositions, close proximity with on-screen texture, Pompeii crafts a vision of an ancient culture that can be described as hyper-haptic; in[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground
Davies – who can be described as a cultural conservative but never a simple nostalgist – wears his affection for his forgotten eras on his sleeve, generally eschewing close-ups in[…]
Biopic · Directors · Writers & Critics
Rather than trying to frame the narrative as a means of truly understanding the mind of its subject, the film emphasizes that the central figure himself controls access to his[…]
Biopic · Historical & Epic · War
Repeatedly, the tragedies in Marty’s life lead him to question the worth of life, and repeatedly the order and stability of the parade re-enters to ease his mind, allowing him[…]
The Color Wheel has been criticized in some circles for having an improvisatory and unfocused structure, yet all the film’s major thematic concerns are explicitly introduced in its compact pre-credit[…]
