Jordan Cronk

This year marked the fifth iteration of the Big Ears music festival, held annually in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. Well established as the mecca of classic and contemporary, experimental and avant-garde music in North America, Big Ears has evolved into a polymorphic entertainment entity, with live events ranging from cathedral-sized installations, to outdoor drum circle extravaganzas, to intimate seances for acts ranging from the harshest of noise merchants to the most meditative jazz ensembles. With...

Art of the Real April 8-21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center José Luis Guerín’s The Academy of the Muses, the highlight of the third annual edition of Art of the Real, casually yet thrillingly embodies much of what drives the nonfiction showcase’s unique curatorial initiative. Indicative of co-programmers Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes’s liberal programming ideology and predilection for works of shapeshifting provenance, Guerín’s film is likewise exemplary of a primary theme coursing through...

"Sunshine Noir" begins tonight at BAM, and continues through December 9 with new films daily. We’re reminded early on in Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Thom Andersen’s landmark dissection of the movie industry’s conflicted relationship with the city it ostensibly calls home, that Los Angeles is a place “where reality and representation get muddled.” And indeed, from the birth of the studio system onward, Hollywood has borne inevitable, though not always intentional, witness to the...