“A little more passion, though, would have been appreciated.” So says Dave Kehr of American — by way of London by way of France —…
The House isn’t quite a home, its neat little anthology package coming too much untied in a miscalculated final leg. The latest in Netflix’s endless stream…
Brazen is slickly made, but it’s otherwise firmly rooted in ’80s Lifetime thriller territory. As a title, Brazen sounds a little old-fashioned, a promise of titillation…
2022’s Scream is a sincere betrayal of the franchise’s legacy and devoid of Craven’s masterful craft and play. A rejoinder to a dead subgenre, Wes Craven’s 1996…
The Whaler Boy undermines any potential for naturalism and rawness with slick artifice and discordant commercial style. Philipp Yuryev’s debut feature The Whaler Boy takes us…
An imperfect film, The Pink Cloud nonetheless stands as one of the defining pandemic texts despite — or perhaps because of — its predated genesis. Iuli Gerbase’s…
Shattered is a sleazy erotic thriller knockoff, one that never realizes its camp potential but which boasts a few poor-taste pleasures along the way. Hidden within…
Expedition Content takes to task the supremacy of the visual in film, delivering a vibrant, versatile work of experimental ethnography. Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati’s Expedition Content…
Woodlands Dark is exceedingly thoughtful and never less than riveting despite its length, a film destined to become an important work of criticism. In 2012,…
Calling Tsai Ming-liang’s body of work interconnected doesn’t begin to cover the throughlines that have developed over the span of more than three decades. One…
#1. “Man, tell them haters open up the jail (Open up the jail) And you can tell my baby mamas, “Get the bail money” (Bail…
#2. Though few may have expected it, Porter Robinson emerged, quite triumphantly, as one of 2021’s most significant pop artists, reasserting himself as the ultimate…
#3. One of the more immediate musical trends to take hold post-Covid was a noticeable shift toward quieter dynamics, embodied most visibly by the singer-songwriter…
#4. Though British producer Iglooghost (aka Seamus Malliagh) operates within some of the more tonally extreme subgenres of 2010s electronic music — UK Bass, glitch,…
#5.The subtext of Outside Child, the solo debut from Allison Russell, is trauma — childhood abuse, cyclical violence, life as a teenage runaway. But the…
#6. Given the current character of the music industry,“online music” is quickly approaching obsolescence as a useful label — if ever it was one. The relationship…
#7. Arriving at the tail end of 2020 — Christmas Day, to be exact — to the bewilderment of fans and skeptics alike, Playboi Carti’s Whole…
#8. As easy as it is to recognize the old spirit that Lana Del Rey has always been, it’s just as easy to see how…
#10. Though prolific and trendy, Bladee remains a figure seemingly detached, his career thus far skirting up against, and indebted to, the western pop music…
#11. Most everyone who writes about Low’s HEY WHAT describes its desolate, fractured noise-scapes as an accurate portrayal of current times. The reality is that life…
#14. Duo Magdalena Bay make pop music that is in love with being pop music. Although their songs burst with playfulness and a desire to…