Our first dispatch from the 2019 New York Film Festival offers quick takes on a smattering of the festival circuit’s biggest films this year, including:…
At his best, Arnaud Desplechin is a mad tinkerer, creating weird, expansive narratives that follow dysfunctional people through the vicissitudes of every day life. He’s…
Imagine old Kanye — heart-on-his-sleeve, pink polo Kanye — mixed with the fiery upstart Kendrick Lamar of Section.80. That’s the intersection where you’ll find YBN…
Brandon Banks is to Maxo Kream what Culture was to the Migos a few years back: a major step forward in terms of personal growth and artistry that signals the…
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message, released in 1982, is one of the most important albums in all of hip-hop. While coming in at…
A 22-song mixtape called Dum and Dummer seems like a fairly innocuous proposition at this point in the rap game. If you were to tell…
SoundCloud junkies Paul Attard and Joe Biglin run down some rap releases from the month of July in the latest What Would Meek Do?. This…
Tracing influence is a tricky proposition. It’s rather easy to duck into any hip-hop forum and post away about how every young rapper with some…
There’s a lot one can be justifiably angry about when it comes to Iggy Azalea. Before issues of cultural appropriation started to rear their ugly…
The last year or so has been bad for the mumble rap scene: from XXXTentacion’s passing in 2018 to the convictions of Lil Durk, Kodak…
Nearly everything and everybody is disgusting in Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove. That is, besides an attractive blonde high schooler whom serial killer/rapist Fritz Honka…
Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro is art in the Age of Trump — so basically the most weak-sauce imaginable critique of a buffoonish caricature (former Italian Prime Minister Silvio…
The corrupt progress of global capitalism is and has been an inevitability for the past half century, its footprint visible in the bruises mottling the…
Lifting a page from a varied litany of genre precedents, Jovanka Vuckovic’s Riot Girls envisions a post-apocalyptic world — brought about via virus, not zombies…
Takashi Miike has never been one to play it safe. With over 100 films under his belt in a little over 28 years, you would…
Writer-director Michael Tyburski’s feature film debut, The Sound of Silence, certainly has an intriguing premise, based on what’s known as house tuning — the process…
Diego Maradona, Asif Kapadia’s latest film, is entirely comprised of archival footage, most of which comes from Italian news sources that preyed upon the famed…
Precise figures will vary, but the fact remains that our world is in the midst of the largest refugee crisis since WWII. The convergence of…
For those who haven’t yet written off James Franco’s entire career, there’s some cause for optimism in the first act of Zeroville, his much delayed…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some…
Chained for Life opens with a quote from Pauline Kael: “Actors and actresses are usually more beautiful than ordinary people. And why not?” Director Aaron Schimberg’s invocation…