Sufjan Stevens What exactly is Sufjan Stevens ascending on his latest album? Celebrity? Corporate attention? This current political moment? God? All that and more, quite possibly — though the 15 songs that comprise The…

While perhaps slightly more superficial than a typical Morris, My Psychedelic Love Story is still another successful entry in the director’s continuing interrogation of late-1960s America. While perhaps not apparent in every film he’s made,…

Mosul nails its action spectacle and kinetic foundation, but it is ultimately only able to conceive of its subject matter in war movie clichés.  Yet another attempt at a topical, ripped-from-the-headlines war movie that wants…

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 fine purveyor of potentially rich and powerful narratives, but…

Superintelligence undermines its innocuous silliness and any potential rom-com aspirations with needlessly complicated stakes and a fixation on its own high concept. There’s a genuinely charming romantic comedy hiding somewhere within the edges of Superintelligence,…

Microphones The unfolding biography of Phil Elverum’s life — which he has for years been telling under his Mount Eerie moniker, most exceptionally in a trilogy of albums released between 2017 and 2019 —…

Happiest Season is trite, platitude-heavy Christmas offering that fails on nearly every front. Five years ago, when Todd Haynes’ Carol hit theaters, a moment was marked in which the worlds of queer cinema and the Christmas film…

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…

In Wonder is an unfortunately empty, depthless bit of underwhelming, barely cinematic fan service. Who is Shawn Mendes? For anyone over the age of 25, that question is probably quite literal; for the 22-year-old Canadian…

The Chicks In her Netflix documentary Miss Americana, Taylor Swift admits to long viewing the Dixie Chicks as a cautionary tale. Referencing their anti-Bush comments from the height of the Iraq War, and their…

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, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me is a…

Run could have been a bit of delightful trash but is instead a disaster of mismanaged tone.  Let’s be very clear about one thing, just so there’s no confusion going forward: Run, the new…