Pablo Escoto’s All the Light We Can See comes with a bibliography in its end credits, a kind of road map to its poetically cryptic approach to narrative. An experimental film in the truest sense, it’s simultaneously epic and intimate, like a community theater production writ large. With…
Dark Red Forest Spiritual faith, by virtue of its abstract and elusive qualities, rarely translates well to the visual medium, if indeed it can be translated at all. Depictions of this faith have ranged from the sacred to the sacrilegious, articulated with either austere minimalism or gratuitous violence.…
Although The Flowers of St. Francis sits comfortably within one Roberto Rossellini’s most lauded creative stretches , it’s a work that still doesn’t exactly have a home in any of the three subcategories that have been parceled out from the director’s filmography: the neorealist period, his partnership with…
Here Today is a baffling, schmaltzy oddball of a film that finds Billy Crystal profoundly out of touch. There’s been something of a recent resurgence when it comes to yesteryear comedians, as the likes of Bill Murray, Steve Martin, and Martin Short have all found renewed success as yet…
A chandelier swings in the gloom, tremulous strings kick in and tension mounts as the camera pulls in. The glinting fixture rocks back and forth through the inky blackness. It is untethered, its branching arms look skeletal, almost otherworldly, and just as the score crescendos, we fade out…
Once seen as a tragic fall from grace, today it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to hear someone sing the praises of the movies Francis Ford Coppola made in the 1980s. Starting with One From The Heart in ’81, the maverick director followed up Apocalypse Now…
Here Are the Young Men fixates on its most histrionic narrative beats and hypermasculine conflicts at the expense of its greater strengths. Set in 2003 Ireland, Eoin Macken’s Here Are The Young Men follows Michael (Dean-Charles Chapman), Kearney (Finn Cole), and Rez (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) over the summer after…
Together Together is a chemistry-rich, mature, and restrained effort of non-rom comedy. It’s never a promising sign when a film’s opening credits mimic a certain Woody Allen style, white Windsor font on a black background, a half-familiar jazz tune opening things up. But writer/director Nikole Beckwith’s gentle new…
DEACON doesn’t match the memorable, eerie energy of soil, but is still mostly successful as an articulation of serpentwithfeet’s new, breezy era (interlude?) of calm. There’s a certain irony to the all-caps stylization of serpentwithfeet’s (née Josiah Wise) latest album, DEACON, as it’s a distinctly mellowed, less assuming…
Green to Gold represents a mostly successful sonic and lyrical calming of the storm for The Antlers. Seven years after their last album, The Antlers have quietly — literally, figuratively — returned. Marking their sixth full-length LP (fourth as a full group), Green to Gold is an album…
Lost Themes III is a true comfort listen, and the most cohesive collection of Carpenter’s original music to be released. Since The Ward flopped in 2010, John Carpenter has worked mostly on his music, notably providing his familiar touch to David Gordon Green’s atrocious reboot of Halloween, and…
serpentwithfeet There’s a certain irony to the all-caps stylization of serpentwithfeet’s (née Josiah Wise) latest album, DEACON, as it’s a distinctly mellowed, less assuming offering than the pair of bold records he previously released: debut EP, blisters, and breakthrough full-length LP, soil, both of which were titled in…
Red Moon Tide offers impressive sonic and visual craft, but is somewhat undermined by its weaker narrative and character elements. An elegiac stillness envelops the population of a coastal town, the death of one of their own evoking a history where the laden myths of sea monsters find…
1994’s Serial Mom marked something of a turning point for writer-director John Waters. A filmmaker who built his name and reputation on such outre, low-budget fare as Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, Waters found unexpected mainstream admittance with his 1988 musical/dance comedy Hairspray, a PG-rated tale of racial…
Ride or Die is overlong, fails to believably sell its central relationship, and ill-advisedly resolves with a bit male gaze exploitation. Whatever the many other faults of Ryuichi Hiroki’s latest feature Ride or Die, it certainly can’t be accused of not practicing truth in advertising, at least as…
Monday is a derivative, dull, and altogether flat effort that captures none of the carefree spirit it partially peddles. With an overly familiar and intentionally simple plot, one that, on its face, resembles Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, and boasting camerawork that lightly mimics the images of late-career Terrence Malick,…
Facile, mawkish songwriting, bland production, and an overly-affected show of “authenticity” do major injustice to Justice. Justin Beiber wants to sell you a narrative: that the once-dumb adolescent from Ontario has grown up, found God (ok, he’s always had that), gotten married, and become a changed man for…
Promises is a masterwork of collaboration, a suite that both teaches and bestows patience, tranquility, and openness. Promises — a ravishing collaboration between Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra — opens with a wisp: A bright smattering of notes played on harpsichord and celeste, wafting…
Justin Bieber Justin Beiber wants to sell you a narrative: that the once-dumb adolescent from Ontario has grown up, found God (ok, he’s always had that), gotten married, and become a changed man for the better. This is something of a foregone conclusion to the arc he started…
After releasing notorious flop/secret success Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, director John Boorman turned to an attempt at producing a Lord of the Rings film. When that failed to coalesce — sadly, as it was allegedly floated that the Beatles would play the four hobbits and that…
Unlike Puiu’s similarly-shaped Sieranevada, Malmkrog is all empty abstraction, mistaking prattle for praxis. “For a talking cinema”: that’s the title that a young Maurice Scherer, not yet christened Eric Rohmer, selected for his signature polemic, and the apparent aim of the current Cristi Puiu project. The Romanian New Wave stalwart certainly…