Andrei Tarkovsky was openly dissatisfied with his Solaris (1972), even though it has endured as perhaps the master’s best-known work, because he felt he didn’t successfully “transcend” the science-fiction genre as he later claimed he would seven years later with Stalker, a film that truly has few directly identifiable ties with the genre it purportedly emerged from. But knowing Tarkovsky, “transcending the genre” here doesn’t mean new interpretations of a familiar formula, but rather implies that Tarkovsky didn’t felt he accomplished what he sought to do in each of his works: make cinema a high art form comparable with the other arts. I respectfully disagree with Tarkovsky’s assessment of his own work. In fact, it is the clearly identifiable ties that Solaris has with its genre that helps the film achieve a specifically Tarkovskyan transcendence. While the filmmaker has a gesamtkunstwerk-approach to elevating cinema as an art form by integrating other great works of art into this work of art (an aspect especially apparent here in the film’s library scene), in Solaris Tarkovsky palpably struggles with the legacy of the genre he’s working in, and in doing so, copes with cinema’s own artistic language while putting forth a unique aesthetic that can singularly be experienced in cinema: the controlled experience of time.

With both Catfish and The Social Network, we’re thinking more and more about how the internet has affected our physical lives. This is not some grand revelation or big surprise considering how embedded in the culture our binary personae are – in fact, it was suggested decades ago and not seen as some sort of crazy prognostication by mad men. It was accepted as what would eventually happen as more and more people plugged in. One such prognostication came in the form of a short film from 2001 called The Parlor. It’s now more relevant and more entertaining than it was back then. And, in the interest of being mysterious (since that’s what sells films these days), I’ll rhetorically ask in big bold letters: WHAT IS THE PARLOR?

Josie and the Pussycats is the best movie ever! Josie and the Pussycats is the best band ever! Orange is the new pink! For some reason, Cole Abaius loves this movie. Has he been brainwashed by subliminal messages in pop music and Mr. Moviefone?