In his films, Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Kicking and Screaming) punctuates “cruelty with tenderness, always taking pains to make sure his characters remain visibly human,” writes Village Voice critic Scott Foundas, who interviews Baumbach at the Walker April 5. Here he reflects on Baumbach works that tend to focus on issues of “intellectual one-upmanship and questionable parenting.”

Fifteen years in the making, Chris Sullivan’s painstakingly hand-crafted film Consuming Spirits peers into twin ethereal realms, lurking familial ghosts and the inebriating spirits that haunt its characters’ lives. But while the themes are otherworldly, Sullivan stays grounded in the concrete as his film’s animator, screenwriter, director, editor, composer, and actor, as Kathie Smith discovers.

In Bill Morrison’s films, time appears as both a historical process and as an autonomous, existential force to which all matter falls prey. Whether treating the march of time as fodder for a narrative of human events or as an irreversible process of flux and decay, he utilizes traces of found footage from our cinematic past, attempting to grapple with the ambiguous concept of “time” itself.

November 29 was a momentous day: After one year and 102 blog posts, Still Dots was complete. Since December 13, 2011, we’d been pulling one frame for every 62 seconds of screen time in Carol Reed’s The Third Man and writing a biweekly analysis of it. With more than 125,000 words behind us, we reflect on what this micro-analysis taught us—and how it might suggest a new kind of film criticism.

“The official cinema all over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, esthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring.” So declared the New American Cinema Group in a manifesto sent out in 1962. Fifty years later, Genevieve Yue looks back on a notoriously turbulent decade through the work of underground filmmakers of the day.

The opening of Jem Cohen’s Occupy Wall Street newsreels—shot through the window of a Brooklyn subway car—uncannily echo a series of videos from two years earlier. Cell phone footage of an Oakland train platform documents the 2009 shooting death of Oscar Grant III by transit police. For Ben Stork, this citizen videography captures the spirit of works in the Walker’s Cinema of Urgency series.

On September 17, 2011—the day the Occupy movement was born—Jem Cohen was there filming what would become his Gravity Hill Newsreels: Occupy Wall Street, which screened at New York’s IFC Center. A day after the movement’s one-year anniversary, Cohen discussed the project and how these “newsreals” served as a “bulwark against … erasure” by mainstream news outlets intent on declaring Occupy dead.

As a student in Chicago, Apichatpong Weerasethakul saw some of the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse drawings and, upon returning home to Thailand, used them as an inspiration for his first film, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000). Since then, his career has traversed dreamlike and surreal terrain, from Blissfully Yours (2002) to his Palme d’Or–winning Uncle Boonmee (2010).

Fifty thousand people or more have been killed in Mexico’s drug war since 2006. But in her new documentary, El Velador, Natalia Almada addresses the death without depicting it: focusing on the quiet work of a night watchman in the cemetery where some of the Sinaloa drug cartel’s most notorious members are laid to rest, the violence has already happened, or it’s about to.