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The Dance of Male Forms in Denis' 'Beau travail'

Claire Denis' masterwork of cinematic poetry, Beau travail, is a cinematic ballet that tracks through tone and style the sublimation of violent masculine complexes into the silent convulsions of male angst.

                                      
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PopMatters is moving to WordPress. We will publish a few essays daily while we develop the new site. We hope the beta will be up sometime late next week.

Claire Denis' masterwork of cinematic poetry, Beau travail, is a cinematic ballet that tracks through tone and style the sublimation of violent masculine complexes into the silent convulsions of male angst.

What is the meaning of diversity in today's world? Russell Jacoby raises and addresses some pertinent questions in his latest work, On Diversity.

We are afraid of time, and so like Leonard in Memento, we kill it, compulsively and indiscriminately.

Rayyan Al-Shawaf's When All Else Fails is politically complex, and its humor is razor-sharp.

In graphic novel Belonging, Nora Krug takes a single idea – her family's involvement in the Second World War and Nazi Germany – and pursues it with relentless, forensic determination.

Rather than moralize, critique, or make grandiose statements about "digital natives", writer-director-wunderkind Bo Burnham brilliantly visualizes what it means to live in a world in which social media is omnipresent.

It's risky to build the success of a genre psychological thriller on the incorporation of psychological therapeutic techniques. But in Cooke's hands, it works.

A sense of bitterness remains for those of us mourning the loss of this final great literary lion of the 20th century.

This collection gives us Ortberg's trademark gender-swapping, flipping of accepted norms of good vs evil even while blurring the line between them, and startling backstories that do not always reveal underlying motivations but definitely add dark, ironic humor.

The isolation of Blade Runner 2049's inhabitants continually reinforces and enlivens their deep need for genuine connection, communal relationships, which the divisive effects of global capitalism actively undermines.

Mostly Straight is a mostly inadequate answer to the question of male sexual fluidity.

"... (I)n a way we are all trans, we are not fixed beings, we are not one thing, we are constantly changing."

The liminal state between immigrant and citizen becomes the permanent experience of undocumented people.

Psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher Alenka Zupančič provides a brief, difficult, yet ultimately rewarding look at the "otherness" of sex as an act, as identity, as communication.

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After Ireland considers the changing culture, the changing identity, and a fast-changing Ireland in the varied voices and languages of its literature.

Julie Lythcott-Haims gives a voice to the internal dialogue—the self-loathing, really—of living a life as a biracial woman who, for most of her life, wasn't quite sure if she was allowed to call herself black.

Video games have made me used to inhabiting the skin of others. For many of us, this is one of the biggest reasons we play games.

Virginia suggests that material evidence implies interpretations and conclusions that don't necessarily always align, as we would like them too, with certainty and proof.

Sometimes growing up can feel a little like killing yourself.

Clothes make the heroine, just as they do in real life or as they do in our virtual lives

Valiant Hearts challenges the barbaric connotations of the appellation “the dogs of war” by making a dog, the only creature blind to the “essential” identity markers of nationalism and language, the hero.

Games seem like the medium that might best challenge the authority of the author, given as they are to allowing the player to manipulate their “texts", to build within their systems, and potentially to break, rearrange, or reorder them in some personally satisfying way. Games seem like that.

The oddest detail in a game world that concerns itself with including shampoo bottles, cereal boxes, and VHS tapes is the fact that the house that you occupy in Gone Home is missing one item so common to human experience and so common to domestic spaces. This is a home that contains no mirrors.

Modern games seem intent on treating our imaginations as if they were as hostile as the projections in Inception.

In the works of many New Wave auteurs, a sense of alienation often leads to disillusionment. Unlike the pessimism of many of her contemporaries, Agnes Varda views alienation as a quest for identity, one that offers hope and freedom, no matter the uncertainties.

Transgender representation in modern film, television, and literature blurs the lines of gender, class, race and sexuality, which is precisely why trans narratives are still considered dangerous.

Fans of electronic music will find a lot of massive events going on around the US this summer. Here are a few to look out for.

By saying Not is not Sidney Poitier, the reader is tempted to compare him to Sidney Poitier just as the characters do, when the author is pointedly saying that we shouldn’t.

As James Mangold neatly puts it, these characters are running along 'a kind of Möbius strip of hell.'"

Amanda Peet, not incidentally, throws some fine, even sublime, attitude.