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.