At once playfully ecstatic objects and cultural time pieces, avant-garde classics and foundation texts for queer cinema, the nearly two dozen Warhol films I’ve seen (out of some 160 nonscreen-test titles) enliven and excite. They also underscore just how calcified much of cinema is, including work made under the generally meaningless rubric of independence. To watch most commercially produced movies is to watch the same endlessly recycled three acts and cautiously modified visual tics again and again. The names change from product to product, country to country, but little else. To watch a Warhol film is to rediscover cinema’s plasticity, boundlessness, mystery and possibility.

That’s an excerpt from a long Manohla Dargis essay that appeared in the New York Times this weekend, in advance of the November 11 opening of a 33-title retrospective of Andy Warhol’s films at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Whether or not you plan on attending the retrospective, the Dargis essay is a must read. Above that, you’ll find a fair illustration of what she’s talking about: a clip from Warhol’s Vinyl (1965).