Gabriel Winslow-Yost

No Surprises

The comedian Nathan Fielder’s new HBO show is an expensive, painstakingly constructed machine for managing uncertainty.

Compulsion, Triumph, Regret, and Unease

“Video games have access to compulsion—that kind of deep-seated slot-machine feeling—and the mindless cleaning-up-the-kitchen zone-out in a way that other art forms don’t.”

Exhausting All Possibilities

The video game The Stanley Parable is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.

Sketching an Uncertain Future

Eleanor Davis is one of the very best cartoonists working today.

Somnolent Thailand

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film Cemetery of Splendor, the most nakedly political film of Weerasethakul’s career, is a gentle, open-hearted story of human connection, underlain at every moment by rage and dread.

Video Games: The Secret Life

How games work and what they can mean

Russia's Darkest Filmmaker

The wonder about late Russian filmmaker Alexei German’s Hard to Be a God is not that it took so long to make, it’s that it got made at all.

Comics in the Trenches

Jacques Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches is one of the most passionately bleak works in the history of comics.

Parasites in Eden

“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 Joys of ‘Mere’

One of the joys of Mere, the new book by the cartoonist C.F., is how thoroughly it resists categorization, or even basic explanation.

A Mind Among Pigs

While we have some idea of what is going on in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, we have no idea how we’re supposed to feel about it.

A Triumph of the Comic-Book Novel

The intricately bleak work of Chris Ware

The ‘Stalker’ Game

In the Zone of Alienation: Tarkovsky as Video Game

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.