With spying in the news in a big way, Vulture looks at current events through the prism (if you will) of film history. It tracks depictions of snitching, stalking, and high-tech surveillance from Metropolis (1927) to The Dark Knight (2008).

A promotion for IBM’s research on atomic memory, this is also the world’s smallest stop-action animation. A Boy and his Atom was made by photographing atoms stacked two high and magnifying the results 100 million times to create a story.

At Ebertfest 2013 over the weekend, Tilda Swinton celebrated festival namesake, the late Roger Ebert, by leading the crowd of 1,500 in a dance-along to Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything.” Two thumbs up.

Last here for a 2007 retrospective, Michel Gondry premiered his new film, Mood Indigo (starring Audrey Tatou), in Paris Wednesday. It’s been likened to an “episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse that’s been co-directed by Terry Gilliam and Salvador Dali.”

Jellyfish Eyes is the name of Takashi Murakami’s wallpaper long a fixture near the Walker Art Lab. It’s also the title of his debut film, hitting theaters Apr. 26, which features an array of “fantasy creatures, from the utterly hideous to the unbelievably adorable.”

Les Blank, dubbed the “King of the Folkie Filmmakers” by J. Hoberman, has passed away at 77. Celebrating folk communities, from polka lovers to Zydeco phenoms, his films include Burden of Dreams (1982), which chronicled the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

Olivier Assayas (Carlos) on the ’70s: “You stepped out of the old world and into a parallel one where you could be yourself and do something no other generation has done since: experiment with your own life, your own fate. And there have been a lot of casualties.”

“No good film is too long,” wrote Roger Ebert. “No bad movie is short enough.” The influential film critic, who visited the Walker in 1999 for dialogue with Werner Herzog, passed away Thursday at age 70 after a long battle with cancer.