Sharon Van Etten’s “Your Love Is Killing Me” is one of the year’s best songs, off one of the year’s best albums. Aptly described as a “pocket epic,” the track has Van Etten’s voice simmer and simmer until it reaches a low boil, her anger and heartbreak exposed over a rising tide of organ, piano, and guitar. It’s a straightforward but wrenching tune, and the music video, by Sean Durkin, does its raw beauty justice.

What’s more terrifying than the shower scene in Psycho? The shower scene in Psycho carved out on a pumpkin and presented in stop-motion.

OK, maybe it’s not more terrifying. 

“Lens flares seem to catch a bad rap,” writes filmmaker Jacob T. Swinney in the description of his lens flare compilation over at Vimeo. It’s true: The dramatic effect created when a very bright light shines into a camera lens has become such a common feature of Hollywood sci-fi and action flicks that it’s now rather easy to scoff at. (They’re also easy to add digitally; J.J. Abrams reportedly included 721 lens flares in Star Trek.)

But when used well, the too-bright-to-look-at-directly power of lens flares can be a beautiful thing, and Swinney captures that in this video, appropriately scored to “Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor)” by John Murphy.

T-Pain performing a nearly a cappella version of his 2007 hit “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin’)” is something I never thought I’d see—much less enjoy. But, thanks to NPR’s intimate Tiny Desk Concert series and their request that he perform a three-song set sans any “embellishments or effects,” that’s exactly what we’ve been treated to today.

Chris Pratt impressed everyone recently with his ability to memorize rap lyrics. But we learned Tuesday on the Tonight Show that there’s another famous young actor who’s even better at it: Daniel Radcliffe. After explaining his “obsession with memorizing lyrically intricate and fast songs,” Radcliffe rose to Jimmy Fallon’s challenge to rap Blackalicious’ tongue-twisting 1999 classic “Alphabet Aerobics.”

Last week FKA Twigs impressed again with her innovative commercial for Google Glass. Today, she’s added to her growing collection of masterful videos with a haunting new one for the aptly titled song “Video Girl,” off her debut album LP1. It would probably be more accurate, in fact, to describe this wonderful piece of work as a short film.

Geat news for movie lovers generally and Orson Welles fans in particular: The director’s storied but unfinished final film, The Other Side of the Wind, may finally be completed and shown next year. As the New York Times reports, the production company Royal Road Entertainment has managed to strike a deal to buy the rights to the movie, with the aim of screening it in California by May 6, 2015, which would have been Welles’ 100^th birthday.

Welles spent the last 15 years of his life working on the movie, which stars John Huston and also features Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, and Dennis Hopper in its cast. 

Jack Bruce, who died Saturday at 71, was a multi-talented musician with a long andvaried career, but he is still probably most famous for the work he did in the late 1960s as the bassist and lead vocalist for Cream.

The day after he died, his Cream bandmate Eric Clapton posted an instrumental track on Facebook with the simple note, “for Jack.........ec.” You can hear it viaStereogum below.

In the age of Twilight and True Blood, it’s a near Herculean task to make vampires interesting again. Jim Jarmusch did it earlier this year, but he’s a wizened, white-haired film genius; more impressive is young director Ana Lily Amirpour, whose debut film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, is a gorgeous black-and-white vampire flick that received major acclaim at Sundance. From the trailer, the film looks like a sleek, impeccably mounted must-see that injects fresh blood into a comatose genre.

When Maya Angelou died in May, it was hard to digest the full scope of her influence. It still is: in poetry and politics, Angelou displayed a profound, life-affirming wisdom that inspired millions of people. The latest installment of Blank on Blank captures a tiny bit of that wisdom—it’s a conversation between Studs Terkel and Angelou about the greatest long con her stepfather, Daddy Clidell, ever pulled.