by Luke Gorham

DEACON doesn’t match the memorable, eerie energy of soil, but is still mostly successful as an articulation of serpentwithfeet’s new, breezy era (interlude?) of calm. There’s a certain irony to the all-caps stylization of serpentwithfeet’s (née Josiah Wise) latest album, DEACON, as it’s a…

Green to Gold represents a mostly successful sonic and lyrical calming of the storm for The Antlers. Seven years after their last album, The Antlers have quietly — literally, figuratively — returned. Marking their sixth full-length LP (fourth as a full group), Green to…

Episode Description: This week, the fountain of youth wreaks havoc on the lives of Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis, and Goldie Hawn in 1992’s dark comedy Death Becomes Her, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Streep plays a vain, aging actress trapped in a loveless marriage who…

Episode Description: This week, we’re talking 2021’s first legitimate blockbuster (of a sort): Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the four-hour behemoth currently streaming on HBO Max. Yes, we’re aware this isn’t a summer film, but we covered the 2017 original. Also, we’re gluttons for punishment.…

The Spine of Night is a whole lot of movie. Despite the film’s relatively straightforward fantasy logline — sorcerer goes mad with power, attempts to take over and/or destroy the world, unassuming hero saves the day — both its narrative and animation feature a…

The problem with so many teen movies is that they shape themselves according to shallow extremes of adolescent feeling, and specifically of young romance. There’s perhaps no greater period of emotional potency than adolescence, a time of life typically ill-understood by those living it,…

Little Oblivions is a sonically expansive, linguistically mature step forward for Julien Baker. “Faith Healer,” the third track on Julien Baker’s latest album, Little Oblivions, opens with a lament: “Oh, I miss it high, how it dulls the terror and the beauty.” Specifically, she’s singing…

The Fever has plenty on its mind and is considerably weighty in its own right, but feels somewhat too indebted to obvious, superior arthouse touchstones. “They woke up something that was asleep inside of us. They made us see what we didn’t know.” The imprecision…

Episode Description: This week, a weekend trip to Myrtle Beach will change the lives of four best friends forever in 1989’s Shag, directed by Zelda Barron. It should come as no surprise that this dance-centric film was hoping to ride on the coattails of…

Celine Sciamma’s characters have always existed on a precipice of some essential awareness, riding the ebbs and flows of emerging self-knowledge, and arriving at necessarily unsettled places. Specifically, her films explore that bardo between childhood and adulthood — often, but not always tethered to…