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Film Day Is Done

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Distilling what art critic Jerry Saltz called the "clusterfuck aesthetic" of his sprawling, 2005 mixed-media installation of the same name into an epic-length pseudo-musical, Mike Kelley's Day Is Done is a deeply fractured fairy tale in which high school clichés and suburban monsters populate a looking-glass version of youth culture. The piece's 31 loosely intertwined episodes surreally reconstruct found yearbook photos depicting a variety of performance-centered activities — dress-up days, special assemblies and concerts. The resulting two-hours-plus video recalls the color-saturated occultism of Kenneth Anger's films, but Kelley's rituals seem more in the service of regression therapy (via Waiting for Guffman) than the black arts.

– Matt Sussman