If celebrity is a cult in this modern media landscape, then veteran pop star Moretti crowns himself its messiah in Opus, as Mark Anthony Green illustrates a corrosive symbiosis between stardom and media that sustains its own self-perpetuating spectacle of power.
Hell is a condition of being for souls lost to compulsion in Ballad of a Small Player, and one that Edward Berger blurs into a gilded convergence of superstition, lighting up the global gambling capital as a dazzling, ghostly underworld of endless consumption.
Memory is the only projector that Hollywood celebrity Jay Kelly willingly surrenders to in his twilight years, and as he watches those frames of his regretful past unspool, Noah Baumbach composes a bittersweet reflection on the fragility of selfhood beneath the glare of stardom.
Through Nouvelle Vague’s homage to cinema’s boldest revolution, Richard Linklater reaffirms his place among those who champion the thrill of raw creation, recounting the feverish, spontaneous inspiration that erupted on Jean-Luc Godard’s chaotic production of Breathless.
