Social Hygiene Retreating from the weight of actions into the weightlessness of words, Denis Côté’s latest finds a rambunctious solace in the oratorial. Serving possibly as a stylistic antithesis to 2019’s dialogue-free Wilcox (centered around the life of a drifter), the opportunely-titled Social Hygiene…
Berlin Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 4: Introduction, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, The Scary of Sixty-First
Introduction It’s somewhat reductive to observe that Hong Sang-soo, so often noted for his diptych structures, seems to have moved into a new triptych phase with his two latest films: The Woman Who Ran and now Introduction. Still, it does seem rather significant that…
Berlin Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 3: Nous, North by Current, I’m Your Man
Nous Cutting across Paris from the north to the south, the RER B is a commuter rail that shuttles passengers to and from the city center, moving between the northern Mitry-Mory commune and the southern Saint-Rémy-de-Provence commune. It is also the axis that Alice…
Berlin Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 2: The Girl and the Spider, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Drift Away
The Girl and the Spider Like their previous collaboration, 2013’s The Strange Little Cat, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider is best approached as a Rube-Goldberg contraption of physical/emotional pressure build-ups and releases. But whereas that film was set almost entirely…
Berlin Film Festival 2021 — Dispatch 1: Films We’ve Already Covered
Taking new shape this year, the Berlinale kicks off today in its virtual version, running for the rest of this week before hibernating until June — tentatively, as COVID timelines go — when it will host in-person screening and events. While plenty of festivals…
Album Roundup — January 2021 | Part 2: Lucero, Viagra Boys, Buck Meek
Lucero Lucero has always found themselves at intersections; sonically, the southern rockers have incorporated, and reconstituted, elements of alt-country, punk rock, cinematic soul, and bluesy folk, which their albums reflect. A typical Lucero set peppers in a few slowed-down, stripped-bare ballad-esque tracks amidst more…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words,…
Album Roundup — January 2021 | Part 1: Jazmine Sullivan, Barry Gibb, Madlib & Four Tet
Jazmine Sullivan Jazmine Sullivan has built a rather remarkable career for herself over the last decade, the sort that few contemporary pop artists are allowed the time to properly nurture. This is, in part, because she was able to step away from the industry…
Black Medusa In a thankless role as one of the most morose femmes fatales in memory, Nour Hajri plays Nada, a (mostly) mute office worker by day, serial killer (men only, natch) by night. We never find out why. Such is the pseudo-provocative premise…
IFFR 2021 — Dispatch 3: Riders of Justice, Bipolar, Suzanna Andler
Bipolar The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith that things will get better. Grief-stricken after the death of his wife, he seeks out Hades himself and is told:…