Spoon Though we are emerging from Q1 2022 on shaky ground globally speaking, this recent past has already been canonized as a banner micro-era elsewhere in certain Internet music circles, with new albums from ascendant acts like Big Thief and Black Country, New Road (and a returning old…
Love Sux finds Avril Lavigne blending her punk and bubblegum influences to the best effect in ages. When Let Go, Avril Lavigne’s debut album, was released twenty years ago, it arrived with the force of an earthquake. The artist was immediately distinguished from contemporaries like the Backstreet Boys or…
Avril Lavigne When Let Go, Avril Lavigne’s debut album, was released twenty years ago, it arrived with the force of an earthquake. The artist was immediately distinguished from contemporaries like the Backstreet Boys or the Spice Girls: rather than the “manufactured” pop that dominated the late ‘90s and…
Cha Cha Real Smooth With only two features under his belt, 24-year-old writer/director/leading man/wunderkind Cooper Raiff has already developed an idiosyncratic style that can most accurately be characterized as “deeply uncool.” Where fellow filmmakers of his age tend to traffic in hyper-stylized edge and empty provocation, Raiff is…
Timelessness is a crucial thing of nature — where sediments erode and seas dry, nature par excellence remains unchanged, a totality to reckon with, yet itself, by virtue of how all who do so are situated within it, unreckonable. To promulgate such a thesis is to do little…
Panama is a muddled and befuddling film, offering a few choice Neveldine aesthetic choices but otherwise exhibiting a confused embrace of cliché. Intended as a temporary career adjustment, the fracturing of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s directorial partnership has held fast since 2011’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which…
Întregalde is a humble, human-scaled story expertly told and sure to be one of the best films of the year. Radu Muntean might not be as well known in the U.S. as his Romanian New Wave compatriots Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, or Corneliu Porumboiu, but he’s been putting together a…
It’s easy to ride Love After Love’s opulent wave of aimlessness for a while, but it eventually all becomes too exhausting. Love After Love is director Ann Hui’s third adaptation of a story by Eileen Chang, following 1984’s Love in a Fallen City and 1997’s Eighteen Springs. I…
Deep Water is an erotic thriller that’s neither particularly erotic nor thrilling. Those hoping for a horny throwback to the now-considered-classic erotic thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s, or a return to form for their maestro Adrian Lyne, are probably in for a bit of a disappointment with…
Spin Me Round Jeff Baena’s Spin Me Round, co-written with its star Alison Brie, sets out as a comedic take on the very Hollywood idea of an American girl finding love abroad. Brie plays Amber, a manager of the movie’s Olive Garden stand-in, Tuscan Grove, who wins a…
Bitch Ass Slasher flick Bitch Ass opens with the one and only Tony Todd — yes, Candyman himself — as host of a seemingly low-rent cable access show entitled Hood Horror Movie Nights. As Todd lists the surprisingly sparse number of urban horror features, one begins to ponder…
Train Again is yet another bold, precise, and transcendental work from Peter Tscherkassky. As InRO contributor Brendan Nagle once observed, the image — 24 of them needed per second to produce the illusion of movement and also produce sound — of a charging train has certainly been linked to…
There’s an appealing, lulling rhythm to Kogonada’s second feature, but few of its philosophical inquires are met with worthy responses. There is much to savor in Kogonada’s first cinematic project since his widely acclaimed Columbus, and After Yang, indeed, arrives like spring after a lurid winter of technophobic…
Arnaud Desplechin’s third feature, Esther Kahn, premiered to mixed reviews at the 2000 edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Originally clocking in at 152 minutes, the celebrated young director of the much heralded My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument suddenly found his latest project met with a…
The Batman is an entirely overlong and overextended affair, but otherwise delivers gorgeous imagery, thoughtful mythos, and playfully brooding emo inflection. The Dark Knight is moodier than ever in The Batman, which is really saying something. Director Matt Reeves’ new iteration of the superhero (here played by Robert Pattinson)…
If one were to name the auteur who most avidly committed to the integrity of mise-en-scène and who was always truly passionate in polemical defenses of this concept, it could be none other than the French master, Jacques Rivette. Whether throughout his career as a film critic and…
Servants is a brutal, efficient affair, unconventional in its dramaturgy but landing with considerable force. Director Ivan Ostrochovský’s Servants begins with a cryptic, murky sequence that quickly reveals itself to be an in media res cold open; a car careens down a dark road in the dead of…
A Banquet is atmospherically impressive for its first two acts, but doesn’t quite know how to stick the landing. The decision to eat or abstain is one that haunts women throughout Western narratives. Whether it is Alice, in Wonderland, eating as the first step of an adventure, or…
The Cursed is blessed with beautiful images but is otherwise plagued by an overly familiar werewolf narrative. Why’s it so hard to make a good werewolf movie? As one of the handfuls of enduring horror archetypes, filmmakers keep trying and trying, but tales of lycanthropy seem to have…
Ted K takes a potentially fascinating study and reduces it to a series of madman tropes and Wikipedia summarizing. The name Theodore Kaczynski has, for better or for worse, been so ingrained in our present-day cultural consciousness that its abbreviation, ‘Ted K’, contains little ambiguity. From anti-capitalist messiah to…