by Greg Cwik

Brian De Palma is the great voyeur, the plump-bellied pervert, of American cinema. His films have a singularly sleazy feel, gloriously gaudy and admirable in their ribald ridiculousness. Consider the high school girls shot in salacious slow-motion in the beginning of Carrie, or Rebecca…

Though the films of John Cassavetes are often erroneously described as “improvised” or “verite,” claims that belie Cassavetes’s formal fidelity, it was a modernist, Virginia Woolf, who, in 1919, ten years before Cassavetes’ birth, described pretty well what would become something of a mantra…

Lost Themes III is a true comfort listen, and the most cohesive collection of Carpenter’s original music to be released. Since The Ward flopped in 2010, John Carpenter has worked mostly on his music, notably providing his familiar touch to David Gordon Green’s atrocious…

“Movies don’t scare me” — said a straight-faced and stoical John Carpenter to Mick Garris in a 1982 television interview called “Fear on Film.” (Accompanying Carpenter: gregarious class clown John Landis and David Cronenberg, the latter waxing political and philosophical while Carpenter himself just…

Lopatin’s patchwork panoply of snippets and songs in collision is kaleidoscopic, peaceful, and placating.  The purloined production of Daniel Lopatin’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, “recorded”/constructed in pandemic-imposed solitude, is suffused with dizzying, sumptuous static redolent of a sibilating station of FM radio (i.e. New…

The only form CYR represents a return to is Corgan’s familiar, tedious navel-gazing and nostalgic rehash. The year is (was) 2020, and Billy Corgan, the Draconian master of alt-rock melancholy, as apt to slam power chord riffs on guitars stacked 40 high as he…

To the casual observer, viewing someone else’s relationship from the outside, there often appears to be a sense of unity, cohesion of the somatic and the soul — from two, one. The lovers themselves, though, know something no one else does: they see the…

Hamilton barely qualifies as a film, losing much of what makes it a stage success in translation, and its historical revisionism feels much murkier in 2020 America.  In New York, during the 19th century, there was Broadway, which catered to New York’s more affluent…

Describing Sofia Behrs Tolstaya, a diarist and photographer who remains better known as the wife of Leo Tolstoy, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: “With her mangled intelligence, her operatic, intolerable frenzies of distress, she comes forth still with an almost menacing aliveness, saying it all like…

In 1954, a 19-year-old girl named Sylvette David sauntered past Pablo Picasso’s window. The aging artist was instantly beguiled. A few weeks later, he revealed a portrait of David, the first of 60 that he would paint that spring. She became his inspiration, his…