Horvát's fascinating Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time (2021) examines desire’s potential to warp and transform the environment within which subject and object interact. On genre confines and a very intriguing film... foreignfilm.substack.com/p/preparations…

González’s Dos Estaciones (2022) offers an endless assortment of oppositions that contour interpretation without confining it, all while building complex characters whose particular strengths and blindspots speak to something deeply universal. Read more: foreignfilm.substack.com/p/dos-estacion…

Pacifiction (2022) captures contours of power (embodied by a minor diplomatic official) delimited by circumstance and position, while exploring the intricate gradations of political influence within neocolonial contexts. Read more: foreignfilm.substack.com/p/pacifiction-…

Fyzal Boulifa’s magisterial The Damned Don’t Cry (2023) leverages various “cinematic” effects in order to smooth the sharp edges of the work’s social realism, rendering palatable extremely challenging subject matter. Full discussion: foreignfilm.substack.com/p/the-damned-d…

Film noir, the espionage thriller, and contemporary Egyptian politics are all fertile ground for cynics. Tarik Saleh's incisive Cairo Conspiracy (2022) tells the story of how religious institutions make their peace with political overlords. Read more: foreignfilm.substack.com/p/cairo-conspi…

In Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), the ugliness is never subtle. Instead, its sheer repetition, the dull obviousness of continually articulated malice, remains the point: an accretion of antipathy that breaks individuals. Read more here: foreignfilm.substack.com/p/ali-fear-eat…

Lou Ye's brilliant Suzhou River (2000) uses jump cuts, handheld cameras, voice over narration, visible light sources, a videographer protagonist, and characters who work as performers to highlight undermine "cinematic" narratives. Read more below: foreignfilm.substack.com/p/suzhou-river…

Volker Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita (2000) harnesses ambivalence in order to examine certainty and its costs. Read more here: foreignfilm.substack.com/p/the-legend-o…

A roundup of the most recently discussed films: foreignfilm.substack.com/p/roundup

My new short story "The Mets" in The Baffler. Read here: bit.ly/4oiO9wi

“Within this ridiculous endeavor featuring rich men and artificial rules, the Yankees usually win and the Mets usually disappoint. There is something human about this.” Read new short fiction from Nick Foretek on our site now. thebaffler.com/fiction/the-me…

His dog committed suicide-by-Cybertruck, his ex-wife is in league with multinational banking conglomerates, and his apartment building’s new elevator buttons lack buoyancy. How can a man go on under these conditions? thebaffler.com/fiction/the-me…

“As part of his compensation package, the building gives him a free apartment on the ground floor. In every room of this free apartment, the building super has mounted pictures of Martin Heidegger.” thebaffler.com/fiction/the-me…

“The squelch is a metonym for their sexual intercourse.” In Nick Foretek’s Issue Sixteen short story, a trauma surgeon attends a pornographic fiction workshop. thedriftmag.com/porn/

Terrific new short story by Nick Foretek out today. If you share it enough I'm confident we can get this to be the top result when someone searches "porn" on the internet thedriftmag.com/porn/

Very cool to see my new short story "Porn" in The Drift. Thanks to Livia Wood and everyone else at The Drift for the space. Read here: bit.ly/3X0WsAt