Rifkin’s Festival isn’t necessarily major Allen, but it’s a light romp that exists at a fascinating nexus of the director’s career-long pursuits and predilections. There’s a saying that goes something like, no matter how many times you’ve told a joke, if it’s genuinely funny and you know how to…
“This boy… and this girl… were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” So begins the dramatic voice-over of Nicholas Ray’s debut feature, They Live By Night (1948). It’s an apt motto for virtually all of Ray’s oeuvre, one filled to the brim with neurotic romantics…
“A little more passion, though, would have been appreciated.” So says Dave Kehr of American — by way of London by way of France — director Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein, his 1976 film of Nazi ascendency and distorted identities. Losey liked images that were cool to the touch,…
Brazen is slickly made, but it’s otherwise firmly rooted in ’80s Lifetime thriller territory. As a title, Brazen sounds a little old-fashioned, a promise of titillation by way of the Hays Code. It makes sense, then, that new Netflix thriller Brazen comes from the pen of famed romance novelist…
The Whaler Boy undermines any potential for naturalism and rawness with slick artifice and discordant commercial style. Philipp Yuryev’s debut feature The Whaler Boy takes us to the far reaches of the Chukotka Peninsula, the northeastern edge of Russia’s territory, with only fifty-five miles of Bering Strait separating it…
#1. “Man, tell them haters open up the jail (Open up the jail) And you can tell my baby mamas, “Get the bail money” (Bail me) I said one thing they ain’t like, threw me out like they ain’t care for me Threw me out like I’m garbage,…
#7. Arriving at the tail end of 2020 — Christmas Day, to be exact — to the bewilderment of fans and skeptics alike, Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red was finally delivered to the world after months of hyper-speculation and a slew of false starts (including an appropriately named mid-tier…
#14. Duo Magdalena Bay make pop music that is in love with being pop music. Although their songs burst with playfulness and a desire to center the unexpected, the overwhelming impression their tracks leave you with is one of care — care to polish their songs until they…
#16. 2021 saw Club Harlecore open its doors to the Internet, a 24-hour web-based rave spot featuring a quartet of mystical DJs brought into our reality by maximalist pop producer Danny L. Harle to coincide with the release of his first full-length album, Harlecore. Surprising as it may be,…
Honorable Mention: Licorice Pizza is, like almost every other Paul Thomas Anderson movie, about America. More specifically it is about America as embodied in the Los Angeles area of California in the 1970s, just as Inherent Vice and Boogie Nights were before it. There Will Be Blood is…
Honorable Mention: After the WWII-set Phoenix (a production so emotionally taxing it seems to have severed the relationship between the director and his long-time collaborator Nina Hoss) and the historical dystopian Transit, which manipulated temporal signifiers to portray the fascism of the past encroaching upon and swallowing up…
#24. Siberia flaunts Abel Ferrara’s enthralling and fearless devotion to a uniquely dynamic (and specifically filmic) form of psychological expressionism — an approach that is still at least modestly grounded in supplying bread-crumb details of narrative, which here means a focus on the spiraling soul of Clint (Willem Dafoe)…
#19. Of all the new phrases to emerge into the online vernacular, one of the most useful has to be “main character syndrome.” Describing the phenomenon of behaving as though one were not just the main character of their own life, but of everybody else’s too, the phrase…
#7. Perhaps one of the greatest movie miracles Steven Spielberg has ever pulled off is in overcoming the Ansel of it all in his remake of West Side Story. Anyone who has borne witness to the actor’s musical pursuits understands what a charisma black hole he is, and…
#8. Perhaps the most memed film of the year (give or take Annette), M. Night Shyamalan’s Old challenged and beguiled audiences in equal measure, becoming one of the first significant post-lockdown box office successes despite the social media scoffing. Of course, this isn’t anything new for Shyamalan, now…
#9. Cristi Puiu’s fifth fiction feature, Malmkrog, represents a further entrenchment in the oeuvre of perhaps the Romanian New Wave’s most dedicated portrayer of claustrophobic incidents and the web of personal interactions that can result in such confined spaces and at such long durations. Malmkrog represents something of…
A week awaited, but our writers’ Top 5 Albums of 2021 have arrived. Long-time readers may not be surprised with our pick for #1, but it’s simply unimpeachable. Indeed, our enthusiasm is so robust that we’ve included two pieces on the album (one a rave from earlier this…
One day more until our Top 5 Ablums of 2021 are revealed, but we’re stopping over at #6-10 in the meantime, which reflect perhaps the most eclectic quintet in our countown. Most albums, even if we previously covered them, have been revisited with new words and new writers,…
We’ve reached the halfway point of our Top Albums of 2021 countdown, delivering today thoughts on albums that ranked #11-15 in our writer’s poll. Most albums, even if we previously covered them, have been revisited with new words and new writers, and everything in our Top 10 has…
Day 2 of our Top Albums of 2021 countdown, meaning we have thoughts on favorites #16-20 today. Most albums, even if we previously covered them, have been revisited with new words and new writers, and everything in our Top 10 has been given this treatment. Check out our…