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

Sam Barlow’s video games may be the first efforts at interactive cinema—by either a game designer or a filmmaker—that work.

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

What kind of place is the Internet? A few years ago, an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” by Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, started getting passed around online. In it, he observed that as the publicly accessible Internet gets more hostile, besieged by “the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors,” people are retreating to safer regions: “newsletters and podcasts…Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message b…

Calvin and Hobbes ended, nearly thirty years ago, in white: snowfall has turned the woods into a “brand-new” world, as Hobbes puts it, “like...a big white sheet of paper to draw on!” The enormous final panel is half empty, with just a few bare trees in one corner, and Calvin and Hobbes rocketing off on a sled. “It’s a magical world,” Calvin famously declares. “Let’s go exploring!” The Mysteries, Bill Watterson’s first book in the decades since he brought his masterpiece to a close—practically…

Nick Drnaso draws comics with a minimalism just this side of crudeness. The colors are flat, the lines uniform and thin, the pages strict grids of small panels. His characters are soft and boxy and barely differentiated, like cheap cars: their clothes are vague masses of fabric, their hair sits in rigid lumps above round, empty faces—in his first two books, the collection of linked stories Beverly (2016) and the graphic novel Sabrina (2018), their eyes are simply black dots. These faces are at t…

No one would call Paul Schrader an especially funny filmmaker, but he has made at least one truly hilarious movie: his contribution to Venice 70: Future

In a sense, The Last of Us was always meant to be on HBO. The 2013 video game was designed to mimic television and film, with frequent noninteractive

The New York Review of Books expanded its purview beyond books almost immediately, with a pointed review of “non-books” by John Hollander in the very first issue, but while the Review has covered paintings, music, photography, film, theater, and television for nearly sixty years, it wasn’t until 2012 that we published a review of a video game, albeit one based on an Andrei Tarkovsky film. That essay was written by Gabriel Winslow-Yost, who would go on to write for our pages a consideration of vi…

There is a particular undertow of unease that comes with working all day at a desk and then playing video games at night. They are simply too similar: the

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film Cemetery of Splendor, in which a group of Thai soldiers have fallen mysteriously and, it seems, permanently asleep, is a gentle, open-hearted story underlain at every moment by rage and dread.

Video games are consumed actively in a way that is very different from encounters with books, movies, or other art forms: by definition, one’s time with a game is time spent taking actions, making decisions; and video games generally require a long time to play—dozens, even hundreds of hours, spread out over weeks or months. All this means that an account of playing a video game inevitably involves a recollection of a portion of one’s own life, including a few of one’s own successes and failures, decisions and regrets.

The Dark Master of Russian Film | Gabriel Winslow-Yost

It Was the War of the Trenches is one of the most passionately bleak works in the history of comics. French cartoonist Jacques Tardi is unremitting in his focus on the small, human details of the catastrophe of WWI—not just the look of uniforms and weaponry, but the way one soldier advances in an awkward, stiff-armed posture, “protecting my belly with the butt of the rifle,” and the way another makes sculptures and rings from discarded shells, to sell to his comrades.

“I draw a lot of weird doodles on scraps of paper,” says the Canadian cartoonist Jesse Jacobs—true of most cartoonists, no doubt. But few cartoonists’ work is as suffused with the spirit of the doodle as Jacobs’s. The familiar forms are there on almost every page: a profusion of cubes and spheres, wiggly organic textures, vast fields of invented vegetation. They are more elegantly drawn than your average doodles, of course, cleaned-up and colored and carefully arranged, but the doodler’s mix of…

[caption id=“attachment_45525” align=“aligncenter” width=“536”] C.F.: a panel from “Face It,” December 2012[/caption] One of the joys of Mere, the new book by the cartoonist C.F., is how thoroughly it resists categorization, or even basic explanation. C.F is best known for Powr Mastrs, an ongoing, fascinatingly strange fantasy series with heavy doses of abstraction, barely comprehensible mysticism, and weird eroticism (one plot culminated in an extended sex scene with a squid). Mere, a collecti…

*Upstream Color*, Shane Carruth’s long-awaited second film, begins with an extended sequence of victimization, extraordinary in its deadpan brutality. A young woman (Kris, one of only two characters given real names, played by Amy Seimetz) is stun-gunned outside a bar by a deceptively pleasant-looking man, referred to in the credits as the Thief. He forces a strange grub-like creature down her throat, and she wakes up as a sort of zombie—blank, passive, absolutely credulous and obedient. Over the course of several days, the Thief issues her a series of slightly surreal instructions, takes all her valuables, empties her bank account, even makes her take out a loan on her home to give him more money. Meanwhile, the creature squirms visibly under her skin.

Chris Ware’s drawings are meticulous, even chilly, with flat, muted colors and the straight lines and perfect curves of an architectural rendering. The panels follow an orderly horizontal grid, but have a discomfiting tendency to occasionally shrink to near illegibility; or they might suddenly demand to be read from right to left, or even disappear entirely, to be replaced by pretty but unhelpful typography, complicated diagrams, or plans for a paper model of one of the stories’ locations. Dreams and fantasies invade the story without warning.

Zona, Geoff Dyer’s recent book about the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, has been much discussed for its almost comically thorough dissection

Zona, Geoff Dyer’s recent book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker, has been much discussed for its almost comically thorough dissection of the celebrated 1979 art film. And yet, after reading it, I was left feeling that something was missing. In both the book and the deluge of Stalker coverage its release has occasioned, perhaps the most crucial, and most popular, part of the film’s afterlife has gone entirely unremarked: the video game version. Between 2007 and 2010, a Ukrainian video game developer named GSC Game World to create a series of first-person shooter game adaptations of the film. And while they all have the elements of a standard action game—guns, monsters, missions, traps, loot—much of the player’s activity is oddly in keeping with Stalker’s spirit, sometimes even managing to expand upon it.