In Yourself and Yours, we find Hong Sang-soo amusing himself by writing scenes that are completely ambivalent in nature, mainly due to having lead actress…
Distilled down to a one-sentence summary, the calmly melancholic Right Now, Wrong Then is the very essence of a Hong Sang-soo film: A bibulous director…
Whatever its flaws (and they are myriad), director David Gordon Green’s Halloween is certainly a good looking film: Cinematographer Michael Simmonds mimics John Carpenter’s 1978 original…
For Hong Sang-soo, a filmmaker who usually favors fairly taut narrative structures, Hill of Freedom is something of a departure. The film operates in a…
Our Sunhi is the culmination of a cycle of Hong Sang-soo films, each starring actress Jung Yoomi, about aspiring women filmmaker with a weakness for strong…
Nobody’s Daughter Haewon is an exemplary minor film, shaped more by its incidental pleasures than any grand design. It owes much of its charm to…
Hong Sang-soo’s monochromatic, soju-soaked, metaphysical odyssey, The Day He Arrives, explores the question of whether or not one can ever really escape the past, but…
When asked why he murdered ten people over an eight-day period, the unnamed narrator of Bruce Springsteen’s epic “Nebraska” replies, “Well, sir, I guess there’s just…
An oft-stated yet just as oft-forgotten fact about Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music? Chronicle of backwoods American weirdness though it may be, it’s also…
The 1976 debut album from reggae trio Mighty Diamonds doesn’t usually get lumped in with other roughly contemporary works of Jamaican revolutionary agit-prop, and the reasons why…
Perhaps sensing that he couldn’t push his electric mayhem any further, Bob Dylan retreated from his wild, boozy rock and roll with John Wesley Harding, returning to largely…
Though Days of Being Wild is Wong Kar-Wai’s second feature, in many ways it’s a film of firsts. It’s his first collaboration with Christopher Doyle (arguably the most…
There is a remarkable shot late in The Age of Innocence when the narrator (Joanne Woodward) describes a room in Newland Archer’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) New York City…
They could have called it Young, Gifted and Black, were the name not otherwise in use. Not until Robert Glasper convened his Black Radio sessions in 2012 would…
For an idea of where Andre 3000 and Big Boi’s heads were at after their first album, look no further than the infamous 1995 Source…
Fairly or not, Manfred Eicher’s ECM Records has long been saddled with a reputation for producing airy and cavernous Euro-jazz, best exemplified by Keith Jarrett’s…
The Coen Brothers have a habit of using an innocuous object as a catalyst for many of their convoluted plots. This is slightly different from…
Few things rankle a Southerner quite like the feeling that they’re being condescended to or underestimated by an outsider, and Good Old Boys toes a very fine…
Though it’s not typically thought of as part of the Judd Apatow canon, The Cable Guy (which was co-written by an uncredited Apatow, who also produced, and…
Purple Rain begins with a funeral, but not with mourning: It’s a celebration — a gateway into new life and a new world, where “you can always see…
Rarely has a film’s meaning been so contingent on purposefully disconcerting stylistic contrivances. In Fallen Angels, Wong Kar-wai and his longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle use their collaborative efforts…