There’s very little to distinguish Belfast as a work of art, a film that uses its dramatic and formal elements only in service of feel-good platitudes. The semi-autobiographical film can often bring us closer to a director, pulling back the maintenance panel to reveal the subconscious machinery powering their…
Uppercase Print mishmashes modes and can become a bit of a slog, but there’s enough formal playfulness to recommend it as a valuable addition to Jude’s body of work. Building upon the explicit interrogation of images and their meanings that one finds in I Do Not Care If We…
Jimmy O. Yang makes for an unconventional, likeable lead, but Love Hard is an otherwise frothy and disposable holiday trifle. The bafflingly titled Love Hard would seem to promise an exciting return to the golden age of rom-coms, back before feminism went mainstream and when every character populating such films…
Hell Hath No Fury is something of a departure for Jesse V. Johnson, but the director once again delivers a tough, kinetic actioner, here aided by newfound narrative heft and twisty moralism. Amongst the DTV faithful, there are a handful of directors that have distinguished themselves as truly high-caliber…
Finch is entirely predictable and low stakes, but the duo of nice-guy Hanks and a cute pup musters enough pleasant earnestness to keeps things afloat. Sometime in the future, a massive solar flare has left Earth a ruin. The sun’s rays will cook you where you stand, food and…
Gleefully violent and hyper-stylish but ultimately empty and overlong, The Harder They Fall ultimately manages only to trade in well-worn tropes and clichés. The Harder They Fall begins with a bold proclamation — large type, all-caps letters that fill the screen declaring “THESE PEOPLE WERE REAL.” It’s not…
Gaza Mon Amour finds inspirations in canonical “Mon Amour” films, but takes care to emphasize the present moment and the wya images ferment under occupation. Arab and Tarzan Nasser’s finely-crafted romance, Gaza Mon Amour, invokes the sensibilities of a fairy tale as a means to cultivate grand gestures of…
The Yearbook immediately situates Baby Queen at the fore of contemporary pop. Baby Queen (real name Arabella Latham) debuted in the pop music scene in 2020 with more skills and presence than most artists who’ve spent years in the industry. Her debut EP Medicine was full of pop-rock tracks…
NBA YoungBoy “YB better.” This simple phrase has become a rallying cry of sorts for the millions of prepubescent YoungBoy Never Broke Again (or NBA YoungBoy) stans who continue to flood comment sections and Twitter replies in order to champion their incarcerated artist of choice. The fanbase which…
Louis Wain has one distinctly lovely stretch, but it’s shrouded in pervasive busyness and zaniness that ultimately sinks the whole enterprise. Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain opens with Benedict Cumberbatch, heavily pancaked in old-age make-up, manically dancing in a way that immediately recalls Grandpa Joe’s miraculous recovery sequence…
André De Toth is one of the great, unsung directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As Fred Camper noted in a 1997 essay bemoaning his lack of stature, De Toth receives only a cursory nod in Andrew Sarris’s canonical The American Cinema, with barely a paragraph of vague commentary,…
No Time to Die is a gorgeous entry in the Bond canon, but abysmally paced and expository to a fault. After 15 years, Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond comes to an end in No Time to Die, and while it’s an ambitious (and sure to be divisive) send-off…
1/6 is both a confident and vulnerable comeback for Sunmi, a synthpop work of polished songcraft and raw lyricism. Since 2017, K-pop artist Sunmi’s velvety synthpop singles have helped establish her as one of the most musically striking soloists in the industry. Her songs have cycled through concepts as…
Los Lobos Long before their days of weighty concepts and studio experimentation, Los Lobos cut their teeth as a wedding band, doggedly gigging across Los Angeles. Relying on a deep reservoir of crowd-pleasing covers, the band honed a particular set of skills: an ability to capture the familiar…
Bob Dylan’s 31st studio album was released to lofty expectations on September 11, 2001. Listeners who managed to snag a copy on that fateful day were greeted, just two songs in, with an image of dreadful portent. “Sky full of fire / pain pouring down,” croaked the man…
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) Bertrand Mandico’s new lo-fi whatsit After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is wildly ambitious, extremely beautiful, and maddeningly dull. In the film’s unspecified future, humankind has abandoned Earth and colonized a new, distant planet, After Blue. Determined to not repeat the same mistakes that lead to…
Dear Chantal After something of a breakout with last year’s delightful meta feature Fauna, Nicolás Pereda returns with Dear Chantal, a short created as part of the “Las cartas que no fueron también son” project, an omnibus initiative by the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival that…
Birds of Paradise benefits from gorgeous compositions and dreamy direction, but it never quite reaches the heights its artful pirouetting suggests. On paper, Sarah Adina Smith’s Birds of Paradise seems like a film where nothing should really work, one whose premise can promise only an upbeat Gen-Z riff on…
I’m Your Man has a clarity and vibrancy in its direction that isn’t achieved in its high-concept thematic concerns. Questions of humanity and love are pondered in I’m Your Man, a German production from director/co-writer Maria Schrader that imagines a future where realistic robotic humanoids can meet the needs…
Zhang Yimou’s One Second was originally scheduled to premiere at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, but was pulled at the last, ahem, second for what were claimed to be “technical reasons” widely assumed to be political censorship, due to the film’s Cultural Revolution setting. In November 2020, after…