What’s the difference between music and noise? Besides general semantics, the two terms are perceived to create something of a dichotomy in relation to one…
For virtually his entire career, Abel Ferrara has seemed to occupy a liminal space in film criticism, not unlike the spaces his characters seem to…
After writing the early blueprint for ’90s R&B, Mary J. Blige laid out her own musical foundations on 1994’s My Life. The influence of hip-hop…
Classifying Blue strictly as a piece of cinema seems like a rather odd distinction, considering Derek Jarman breaks the cardinal sin of the medium by…
Since being plucked from relative obscurity by uber-producer Kevin Feige, the Russo brothers, Joe and Anthony, have become two of the most commercially successful directors…
Widely hailed as a major turn in Emmylou Harris’s already illustrious career, the 1995 album Wrecking Ball found the beloved country artist exploring new avenues…
My wife and two children have been at home since March 14th. I worked until the 17th, as my company waffled back and forth over…
Haunting, melancholy, and achingly cool, Louis Malle’s 1958 debut Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour L’échafaud) laid the cinematic foundations for motifs and aesthetics that…
A languid watercraft cruising the currents of the Hudson River. “Captain! Something off the port bow!” A rotten human arm floating in the distance. It…
Alain Resnais’s ingenuity as a filmmaker is on full display in his adaptation of one of the British theater’s most complex and rewarding works, Intimate…
It’s only appropriate that Dusty Springfield’s 1969 record — which found the singer’s vocal sensibilities shifting over to R&B, and to more deliberately paced arrangements…
In their 2015 documentary, De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow let iconoclastic writer/director Brian De Palma speak about each of his films, chronologically, from…
“I’ve only loved girls with dead fathers.” So says Denis Lavant’s young criminal Alex during the midpoint nocturne of Mauvais sang, the sophomore feature of…
For a band so insistent on defying any and all principles of behavior, even (or perhaps especially) when it meant sabotaging their own success, it’s…
Kelly Reichardt’s latest treads familiar thematic territory, but her minimalist leanings here lend toward something altogether more expansive. First Cow is a film of beginnings…
Bacurau’s initial promise of a raucous genre celebration ultimately devolves into a shallow approximation of those pleasures. There’s an undeniable sensuousness to the surfaces of Bacurau:…
The Wild Goose Lake is a thrilling neon noir and incisive commentary on the degradation that comes with rapid economic boon. There’s a particularly pleasing synesthetic…
“I didn’t know you never wake up from some dreams.” says Officer 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), one of many lovelorn characters in Wong Kar-wai’s 1994…
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…
The brilliance in the work of Joel and Ethan Coen comes from the brothers’ ability to find balance in the seemingly contradictory nature of life.…