Dee White, an Alabama native with a preternatural gift for hardcore trad-country, happened to catch the ear of Dan Auerbach, who stepped up to produce…
Speed has always been central to the Della Mae value proposition. When the group formed in 2009, they turned heads not just for being an…
Timing always seemed inscrutable and capricious in the life of Leo “Bud” Welch, the Mississippi bluesman who began his recording career when he was 81,…
There’s historic precedent for No Saint, the debut album from Texas-born singer/songwriter Lauren Jenkins — but it may not be what you’d expect. The album was…
Musicians who rely on either humor or political rage as the foundations of their songwriting typically run out of ways to keep their edge, or…
Suburban Birds opens with an iris shot, a formal gesture that likens it to Feng Xiaogang’s recent I Am Not Madame Bovary. Quickly, Qiu Sheng’s film…
The titular ‘land’ that’s ‘imagined’ in Yeo Siew Hua’s Golden Leopard-winning debut film manifests in two different ways, one explicitly physical (the ever-expanding continent of Singapore,…
The 48th edition of New Directors/New Films runs March 27th – April 7th. Here’s our first dispatch. Included — very much intentionally — in our second and…
Frequently inscrutable and often enveloped in literal darkness, Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto offers the latest (cinematic) rumination on the foundational myth of man’s dealings with the…
Director Mark Jenkin’s Bait is a fascinating curiosity. As a drama, it’s fairly basic, but also mostly effective: Martin & Steven Ward (Edward Rowe &…
Belonging opens with a voice-over delivering an admission of guilt, one coldly articulated by Onur (Çaglar Yalçinkaya), as he hastily divulges the details surrounding the…
Ash Is Purest White begins with the blaring of a bus horn — a sound which bears striking resemblance to another, heard at the end…
Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhadi understands the nature of secrets and their revelations, that they rarely signal resolution and instead work to further complicate situations. Whenever…
A young man heads to Singapore in search of his mother’s family after his father, a successful ramen chef, dies. Gauzy flashbacks fill in his parents’…
As with 2010’s exceptional October Country, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s The Gospel of Eureka brings an intelligent, discerning empathy to matters of political, moral,…
Birds of Passage, Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s latest collaborative effort (previously a producer, Gallego serves as co-director here) finds the duo continuing their thematic…
There’s a fine line between the absurd and the transcendent, and Tim Sutton’s Donnybrook crosses it with ludicrous abandon. Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell) is a…
Kodak Black’s “Moshpit” ends with the couplet “Fuck a protest / Let’s start a mosh pit in here.” At face value, this seems a bit…
There are so few worthy Detroit rap stars these days: You’ve got a complete and utter cornball in Big Sean, who has ambitions of being…
Florida crooner YWN Melly is largely concerned with two things: romantic woes and murder. For every “Murder on my Mind” that the 19-year-old pens, he…
What’s changed for 21 Savage since the release of his debut commercial project, Issa Album? Well, as he puts it on the opening track of…