Gabriel Winslow-Yost

1 month ago | mubi.com | Gabriel Winslow-Yost

The promise of a new sensory cinema calls upon almost every trick from over a half-century of big-screen novelties. “Are You Experienced?” is the spring 2025 edition of the Notebook Insert, a seasonal supplement on moving-image culture. I had tweaked something in my neck a few days before I went to see a 4DX screening of Flight Risk (2025)—a fact I should have considered, but did not. You don’t usually have to think about whether your body is ready for a movie.

2 months ago | nybooks.com | Gabriel Winslow-Yost

The story is so much older now, and farther away. Dracula has always been ancient, foreign, but at first he came to us: in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) he invades contemporary London, a city of telegrams, train timetables, blood transfusions, and phonographic audio logs—all of which were used, by the end, to help defeat him. It was an almost schematic confrontation between old and new, backward Eastern Europe and ultra-modern England. F. W.

Nov 28, 2024 | nybooks.com | Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Choose Love, Netflix’s recent “interactive rom-com,” is a special kind of terrible—the kind that sticks, that spreads darkly in the mind, demanding answers.

Nov 2, 2024 | nybooks.com | Gabriel Winslow-Yost

“Beware of the cliché, the predictable”: that’s one of the notes about storytelling that Francis Ford Coppola keeps posted where he works, as he reports in his book Live Cinema and Its Techniques.1 Watching Megalopolis—Coppola’s first film in thirteen years, funded with over $100 million of his own money—I realized that it should be two rules, not one. Cliché and predictable are not, in fact, synonyms.

Oct 24, 2024 | nybooks.com | Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Near the end of the third volume of CF’s hermetic, hallucinatory fantasy series Powr Mastrs, a character named Pico Farad rips a bit of wiring out of a machine. Pico is a collector of magical objects, which he keeps in an array of little square drawers that looks a lot like a vast grid of comics panels, and this “very beautiful” machine, he tells us, “makes,” among other things, “stories.” “I had to fix it, so I broke part of it!” he declares.