Purple Butterfly is a film of dreamy realism, sometimes insoluble and suffused with a haze that is, at once, sepulchral yet sultry — a film about…
The year 2000 was a watershed year for Chinese-language cinema. Milestones like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and In the Mood for Love and Yi Yi…
The most striking aspect of Weekend Lover, the directorial debut of Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye, is its palpable sense of existence as a…
The literal translation of Don’t Be Young’s Chinese title, “Wei Qing Shao Nu,” means “Emotional Young Lady”— and it is, in many ways, a more than…
After a first encounter, Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye seemed ripe for being written off as a Wong Kar-wai copycat — at best an adept craftsman…
Luther Dickinson has spent more than 30 years as a session player, singer/songwriter, record producer, and ringleader of the North Mississippi All Stars — so…
Reba McEntire cemented her status as country music royalty over the last decade — though, to her infinite credit, she’s quick to correct anyone who refers…
Few contemporary folk artists balance a reverence for that genre’s traditional forms with an ear for pop hooks as well as Josh Ritter. Perhaps what’s…
Our new monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition…
Maybe it’s a response to the meat-and-potatoes austerity of guys like Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell; or maybe it’s simply a case of history being…
The idea isn’t terrible: Having balanced unprecedented commercial status with critical and industry respect, Brooks & Dunn wanted to take an opportunity to reflect on…
There are a couple of ways to apprehend Mule Variations, the twelfth studio album from Tom Waits and the second to be co-written almost entirely by…
In the 2018 election, more women, and specifically women of color, ran for elected office than ever before. Many of these women were progressives running…
The recently released High Life is perhaps the first film by septuagenarian Claire Denis with a plot fit for an elevator pitch: “Robert Pattinson fucks…
Patience is a virtue that most hip-hop fans don’t possess, and one that they don’t really need to; it’s generally been accepted that in order…
From the moment Vampire Weekend stepped off the Columbia University campus and quite literally into Rostam Batmanglij’s “studio” apartment to record songs about Lil Jon,…
From its whispery, ethereal opener, “Contact,” Big Thief’s new album is permeated by an air of otherness. Adrianne Lenker’s voice is an aural phenomenon, Buck Meek’s…
With the public’s appetite for true crime reaching seemingly insatiable levels, Netflix has gone all-in on serial killer Ted Bundy, releasing the four-part documentary Conversations…
In 1987, Margaret Thatcher made her infamous assertion that “there is no such thing as society” in order to espouse her doctrine of methodological individualism.…
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…
Film history is chock full of men falling in love with the ‘whore with a heart of gold,’ either to the effect of their own…