When You Found Me is an emotionally mature, classic rock riff on Lucero’s singular sound. Lucero has always found themselves at intersections; sonically, the southern rockers…
Episode Description: This week, Summer Blockbuster!?! celebrates Valentine’s Day by taking on one of the least romantic romances ever filmed: 1986’s Under the Cherry Moon,…
Judas and the Black Messiah energizes necessary rhetoric and is impeccably crafted, but diminishes its power by sticking so closely to a prescribed biopic template. The…
PVT CHAT hints at sapient commentary of our transactional internet age, but the gesture ultimately proves empty. Writer-director Ben Hozie’s latest, PVT CHAT, is another film…
The Reckoning is a tonal and intellectual disaster, nothing more than an exercise in bland, base brutalism. On its face, The Reckoning seems like a strange…
Episode Description: This week, we conclude our discussion on the 2020 summer movie season by taking on a film we still can’t believe got a…
Beginning emerges from the influence of obvious formal antecedents to become a stirring, singular work from a new cinematic worth following. On its surface, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s…
Downfalls High barely qualifies as a film and attempts little but manages to ride MGK’s guiding charisma to some playful places. If you were one of…
Episode Description: This week, we continue our look at 2020’s very strange summer movie season by tackling the first wide release of the summer —…
Episode Description: We are back! 2021 is a new year, and after taking a break due to COVID (perhaps counterintuitive, we know), we are ready…
Pieces of a Woman showcases a bravura if ostentatious initial quarter, but it’s all downhill from there as the film devolves into mere misery porn tropes. …
The first 30 minutes of CoroNation, Ai Weiwei’s comprehensive snapshot of Wuhan, China in the earliest days of COVID-19’s global devastation, are among the most compelling…
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…
One Night in Miami finds power in its discourse and suggests King’s legitimate directorial chops in moments, but it fails to fully translate its stage origins…
Nasir is a delicate, disquieting film that opens up into something far grander than its brevity and slice-of-life template would at first suggest. What’s immediately striking…
Black Bear is a challenging diptych study of life and art, and the blurred, impenetrable intersection of the two. In the debate between mimesis and anti-mimesis,…
With Lovers Rock, McQueen mostly turns down his directorial affectations and let’s the film’s beauty and joy act as guide. Steve McQueen has always been a…
Between the World in Me capitalizes on the power and poetry of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ words but contributes considerably less as a visual document. Published in 2015,…
Sound of Metal is not the sonic game-changer that its marketing once suggested, but it works marginally better as a restrained, if formulaic drama. Sound of Metal…
The Giant is a textbook YMMV film: an audacious, elliptical fever dream that boasts a deeply affected style executed with a surprisingly sure hand. A dread…