London-based duo Camila Fuchs spent their 2016 debut album, Singing from Fixed Rung, carving out a space indebted to IDM, Kosmische-indebted ambience, and nocturnal trip hop. The enigmatic sounds that Camila de Laborde and Daniel Hermann-Collini utilized on that earlier effort were sufficiently moody, but also somewhat underdeveloped,…
It’s often been said that Mariah Carey has little humility, but how much of that is just for show? Four years on from the flamboyantly-titled Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse — a commercial failure, though one modest critical acclaim — Mimi is…
British-born Najma Akhtar never intended to become a singer; she followed in the footsteps of her parents and graduated with a masters in Chemical Engineering from Aston University. It wasn’t until Najma visited distant relatives in Najibabad, India, and learned Urdu, that she picked up the vocal tradition of spiritual poems…
In an effort to reboot our music coverage, In Review Online has launched some monthly features devoted to reviewing new album releases. Today, we launch Foreign Correspondent — a survey of new releases from the international music world. Issue #1 features takes on albums from Chilean pop artist Alex…
Two years ago, we published Sion Sono: Love Leaves Destruction in Its Wake, an exhaustive review retrospective of nearly every feature film that Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono had directed to date. Tokyo Vampire Hotel is one of Sono’s latest releases — an eight-episode series made available for streaming in the…
Whereas 2015’s Creed transcends its station as essentially the seventh Rocky due in large part to director Ryan Coogler’s reliance on his actors’ emotional intelligence, and his ability to balance character nuance and broad narrative strokes, Creed II resembles not much more than a generic Rocky sequel. Coogler’s out, and new director Steven Caple Jr. abandons the complex…
Composed of six dime-store tales from the frontier — complete with color plates! — and boasting an appropriately storybook feel (courtesy of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, who helms this first foray into digital), The Ballad of Buster Scruggs articulates, with ruthless efficiency, Joel and Ethan…
A suspicious charge on a credit card, a call from the bank — few among us haven’t experienced this. Mostly the notifications cause minor inconvenience, but that isn’t always the case. Set in the world of “cam-girls” — women who perform sexual acts in online chat…
Antonio di Benedetto’s novel, Zama, is renowned for its simplicity, with most paragraphs a mere sentence in length; Lucrecia Martel’s film adaptation is full of detail. Where di Benedetto cuts descriptions short (even principal characters are dubbed “mulatto”), Martel fills every extended shot with sumptuous color…
The Wild Boys opens with a shimmering black-and-white title card, an homage to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks, and voiceover that soon takes the viewer back to the violent origin of this delirious, gender-bending tale. Fueled by an impulse dubbed only “TREVOR” (which may stand in…
