Alternating between charmingly and cringingly unfashionable, George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing defies some orientalist tropes while falling prey to others.
Tilda Swinton
A Strange Hallucination Plagues Tilda Swinton in Memoria
The newest feature from Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a masterpiece of magical realism, and Hyperallergic’s #1 film of 2021.
Yugoslavian Monuments Deliver a Message from Two Billion Years in the Future
The only film directed by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson before his death in 2018, Last and First Men is an eerie combination of sci-fi and documentary.
The Intoxicating Tilda Swinton Masters Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language film, The Human Voice, offers heady pathos and sumptuous visuals in equal excess.
Tilda Swinton Curates Photography Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Swinton’s photography exhibition at Aperture, based on Woolf’s iconic novel, Orlando, does not challenge our imperious need to classify bodies, but is definitely one worth seeing.
The Art of Middlebrow
When I first heard about Tilda Swinton’s “The Maybe,” an ongoing performance piece in which the actress sporadically sleeps in a glass box at the Museum of Modern Art, I sighed and shrugged and laughed a little. Another unoriginal work becomes a cultural flashpoint — cause for media outcry, cause for real, live spectacle, an unexciting performance sold to ticket-buying tourists as avant-garde. What can you do? But “The Maybe” wormed its way into my head, and I found myself confoundedly returning to it often. It was only a week or two later, and after reading Jason Farago’s takedown in The New Republic, that I realized why I cared: middlebrow.
The Perils of Sleeping in an Art Museum
There seems to be a particular penchant among famous actors for taking to performance art (we’re looking at you, James Franco). But actress Tilda Swinton’s ongoing escapade at the Museum of Modern Art, in which she sleeps inside a glass box, is actually a re-performance of an older piece done before Swinton’s recent turn in the spotlight.