Yes, God, Yes doesn’t say anything new about oppressive evangelical traditions but is elevated thanks to Dyer’s wonderful comic performance. Yes, God, Yes will be particularly resonant for a specific subsect of early millennials whose formative years were spent cocooned in the traditions of evangelical…
Translation is an unimaginative record of lazy appropriation and weak production. To put it as eloquently as possible: the Black Eyed Peas are stupid. That’s not a qualitative assessment — the group has consistently produced stuck song bangers over the years, and it isn’t backhanded…
Ghostpoet’s latest is a moody, atmospheric haunted house of an album that represents another step in his artistic evolution. Ghostpoet has always been a serious artist; both thematically and sonically, his work has rarely borne out much levity. It makes a sort of sense, then, that the…
Honey Harper’s Starmaker offers a delicate, otherworldly reimagining of country music. Honey Harper isn’t yet a big name. But if you’ve had any exposure to the musician, you’ll know of his reputation as the modern torch carrier of Gram Parsons’ Cosmic American Music tradition. Born William…
An album a decade-plus in the making, A Written Testimony is Jay Electronica’s thumping autobiography and manifesto. For most of the past decade, Jay Electronica has been more myth than man. After dropping a mixtape in 2007, the MC appeared only in rumors, features, and singles,…
To understand the ostensible intent of Jon Stewart’s latest film, Irresistible, it’s best to begin at the end: “Money lived happily ever after…reveling in its outsized influence over American politics,” a postscript reads. This is a uniquely unifying idea in contemporary America, one that…
Judd Apatow has built and padded his filmography on a basic principle: construct vehicles for comic actors in the early days of their ascending stardom – Steve Carrell in The 40-Year Old Virgin, Seth Rogen in Knocked Up, Amy Schumer in Trainwreck (the outlier…
In many ways, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’amour follows (or establishes, given its chronological situation within his filmography) many of the director’s most characteristic tendencies. From the outset, wonky angles capture images in slight distortion; primary characters exhaust nearly half of the film’s runtime before any…
In many ways, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’amour follows (or establishes, given its chronological situation within his filmography) many of the director’s most characteristic tendencies. From the outset, wonky angles capture images in slight distortion; primary characters exhaust nearly half of the film’s runtime before…
Liberté is gorgeous and confounding, a Brechtian presentation of passion, tedium and perversion. Albert Serra’s Liberté continues the director’s penchant for placing human rot, literal and metaphorical, within the garish trappings and knowing artifice of re-creation. Presented here are the wanton sexual and violent revels of…
