About

In Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters series, the entire duration of a film collapses into a single, blinding exposure. What remains is pure afterimage, a void of light hovering over the empty architecture of spectacle. The film is gone. What’s left is memory, myth, and the infrastructure that once carried meaning but now feels abandoned and strange.

Reel Kernels begins with the same instinct: to reach to the bottom of the popcorn bag and surface the stubborn seeds of cinematic meaning lurking beneath Hollywood’s shine. Rain Man. The Shawshank Redemption. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Interstellar. These are films celebrated for their polish, narrative resolution, and place in the popular imagination. But beneath their bright surfaces, cracks emerge, often showcasing the crumbling dream of American possibility.

Here you won't find rankings or reviews. Just deep dives into modern movies, for the love of allegory, reversals, and the fractures beneath the frame. Because even when a film undermines itself—even when it unknowingly unspools its own illusions—it only grows richer, stranger, and more urgent to watch again and again.

Fingers glistening with butter and salt, we dig for what remains.

Reel Kernels is written and edited by Derek Flack.

His other projects include Spall, an archive of overlooked infrastructures and faultlines, and Motel Register, a meandering encyclopedia of transience and memory.