There’s a wistful touch of George Bailey to the fatefully doomed protagonist of The Executioner (El Verdugo): José Luis is a Spanish undertaker yearning to go to Germany and become a mechanic, a man with big dreams of escaping his morbid career as each and every circumstance ushers…
Kevin Gates It’s been a relatively humdrum couple of years for Kevin Gates, the bulky, burly-voiced performer who deals in big, pop-friendly melodies and stocky rap verses. He’s been MIA ever since 2016, a year that saw a surprising amount of major media hype building around the Baton…
Hard is pleasant, lightweight bit of pop that feels grander than the sums of its modest parts. Hard is Swedish synthpop artist Tove Styrke’s first album in four years. Her last release was 2018’s Sway, a lovely, delicate indie-pop project that thrived on minimalism and precision. Songs like the…
Gone in the Night is a slog undone by its own structural conceit, confining its compelling material to flashbacks and riding a wave of dull inertia the rest of the time. Co-creating and writing the podcast series Homecoming, Eli Horowitz was once near the vanguard of the fiction podcast…
Persuasion tries and fails to hide its thoughtless adaptation instincts and baffling decision-making behind a deluge of modern stylistic flourishes and homages to superior films. I really never thought I could hate an adaptation of Persuasion. But here we are. Austen’s final novel, Persuasion is the story of…
Patrick: Hi there Ryan. Happy to be corresponding with you once again! And on the deceptively dense new work from Olivier Assayas, a miniseries revamp (reboot? remake? retooling?) of his 1996 film Irma Vep. I’d originally thought this’d be something I’d be taking on all by my lonesome…
Even within the teen romance subgenre, Hello, Goodbye stands out as particularly bland, delivering signifiers and signposts in place of genuine substance. Marketing materials for Netflix’s new teen romance Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between proclaim the film as, “From the producers of To All the Boys,” an…
Both Sides of the Blade is a work of true entropy, a unique film in Denis’ oeuvre that leverages a newfound sense of languor to great effect. The past is something of a structuring absence in the work of Claire Denis. In her films, narratively important events and…
The Unknown Country Non-fiction scenarios and non-professional actors are often characterized as so rich and unpredictable that all a director needs to be is a receiver for what percolates in everyday life. But the world is full of contrivances, and a hack director can latch onto them as…
Andrew Infante’s Ferny & Luca is a first feature with a lot of places to get to. It briskly orbits around romantic ideas and images, indulges in city symphony rhythms, and thrills in the idea of an expressive camera. Before it sets up its title pairing, it must…
Wyrm suffers from an imbalance between its two halves, but is otherwise emotionally astute and earns the surreal world it conjures with careful, deeply considered world-building. Expanding on the short film of the same name, Christopher Winterbauer’s Wyrm tells the story of a kid who is very aware of…
Press Play’s mash-up of The Time Machine and The Notebook is plagued by a wet blanket lead, horrid pacing, and a lack of any real romance. Romantic drama Press Play inadvertently stumbled into a bit of good luck thanks to the two-year delay of monster blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick,…
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, while the title of…
Preacher’s Daughter suggests fascinating and unpredictable future stardom for Ethel Cain. Ethel Cain arrived right on time, America currently enraptured with the style and cultural signifiers of its southern and midwestern states (a reaction to “Trump voter” media voyeurism, or the lasting legacy of American Honey?), which the…
Wilco For a while, it seemed like nothing ever came easy for Wilco. Early classics like Being There and Summerteeth bore the marks of personal and professional strife, from inter-band turmoil to lyrics gesturing toward substance abuse. The band’s masterpiece, 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, had an incubation so…
“…love must be regarded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.” – Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities If I was given a Sight & Sound ballot…
A coming-of-age story about a sensitive, artistically-minded young man with filmmaking aspirations sounds like a recipe for mawkish solipsism, so it’s nothing short of a miracle that January deftly avoids cliches and easy catharsis. Recently anointed the Best International Narrative Feature by this year’s Tribeca jury, Viesturs Kairišs’…
Lakota Nation vs. United States “U.S. history is a branch of a larger tree of history… but it’s that covetous branch that thinks it’s the tree.” Proffered somewhere partway through Lakota Nation vs. United States, this assertion operates as a rough thesis for Jesse Short Bull and Laura…
Jack Harlow “Back when I was a young man / I liked them girls that was in the Abercrombie / I likеd them girls that was in the Aeropostalе / Now them same girls got coke in they nostrils / Somethin’ done made the youth hostile / Maybe it’s…
Jack Harlow’s sophomore effort is a tedious affair to work through, built upon a disappointing collection of stock hip hop beats and routine bars. “Back when I was a young man / I liked them girls that was in the Abercrombie / I likеd them girls that was in…
Good Girl Jane Writer-director Sarah Elizabeth Mintz’s debut feature, Good Girl Jane, treads a well-worn path in its portrayal of an innocent teenage girl’s eventual corruption at the hands of “subversive” classmates. The year is 2005, and the titular Jane (Rain Spencer) has recently transferred schools after being…