Kate NV, ever-chameleonic and relentlessly curious, released one of the most dazzling pop albums in recent memory this year with Room for the Moon. While…
The relationship between hip hop and punk rock is a long and complex one, evident since the early ‘80s and built upon a shared willingness…
All hail Taylor Swift: Our most productive quarantiner, our most essential pop star, and the redeeming poet laureate of 2020’s malaise. The two albums she…
The second solo album from the prolific singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers is, in both its aesthetic and lyrical clarity of expression, a total triumph. From the…
Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters has already endured a predictable backlash to its initial rapturous reception — a backlash led by a loud and…
Imagine that your cousin steals your laptop (the dirty motherfucker), finds a rough draft of a project you’ve long given up on, and submits it…
To call Bladee a rapper would be a bit misleading — sure, he sorta sings in a cadence and manner one could associate with “rapping,”…
2020 wasn’t exactly overflowing with significant (pop) rap releases, some of the genre’s biggest stars putting out absolute duds (Donald Glover, Drake), while others hyped…
If you listened to and believed the hip-hop gatekeepers, influencers, and bloggers (whose reviews read like thinly disguised PR campaigns) from the past few months,…
For nearly two decades now, The Avalanches have repurposed pillaged sounds of yesteryear in order to locate a current emotional resonance, to connect the past…
A deeply idiosyncratic survey of 20th-century political and social mores, director Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden transplants Jack London’s 1909 novel from the American West Coast…
Yourself and Yours almost slipped through the cracks. Released in 2016, in the space between the long-awaited breakthrough that was the 2015 release of Right Now, Wrong…
Spike Lee is doing pretty great these days, so much so that he’s been recast as a beloved elder statesman in the cultural memory. Not…
Soul is another complex, cosmic effort from Pixar, and a quietly joyous send-off to a relentlessly bleak year. It makes a certain sense to end 2020,…
Wonder Woman 1984 is bloated at 151 minutes, but the chemistry of its leads and throwback hokey vibes are enough to recommend its particular superhero pleasures.…
News of the World is a film of dangerously naïve messaging, erratic pacing, limited stakes, and little formal or technical craft to otherwise distract from…
Wong Ping’s Fables 2 The first of two fables in Wong Ping’s Fables 2 is entitled “Cow the Super-Rich.” It’s an amusing anti-capitalist tale about…
From our Honorable Mentions post: It goes without saying that 2020 was a year like none other in recent history. Significantly, by virtue of living through…
Promising Young Woman does its best to reshape the rape-revenge narrative into a novel form, but it ultimately fails to muster much ambiguity or thorniness. Heavy…
On paper, Garrone’s moody temperament suggests a potentially fascinating Pinocchio adaptation, but all he really musters here is a dour, half-baked rehash and not much else. As…
From our Honorable Mentions post: While many of us lingered and struggled inside of our homes — and are still patiently following quarantine protocols until…