Fathom In the wake of Planet Earth’s zeitgeist arrival in 2006 and DisneyNature’s subsequent founding a short two years later, the nature documentary — and, increasingly, docu-series — has become ubiquitous, with virtually every major streaming platform doling out a handful of (often aesthetically anonymous) offerings each year.…
St. Vincent’s attempt at a classic rock recalibration is more tone-deaf than innovative. The teaser trailer that dropped on March 2 showed a collection of wavering handheld shots, depicting a harried Annie Clark in a blond wig and trench coat running the green-tinted halls of an aged Manhattan…
St. Vincent The teaser trailer that dropped on March 2 showed a collection of wavering handheld shots, depicting a harried Annie Clark in a blond wig and trench coat running the green-tinted halls of an aged Manhattan apartment building, frantically searching for a ringing phone. Upon locating and…
Get Out gets the alien abduction treatment in No Running, a half-hearted stab at social commentary that isn’t nearly as fun or as clever as that premise might suggest. Director Delmar Washington and writer Tucker Morgan have crafted a sci-fi tale that strains for topicality but can’t even…
Dating & New York Dating & New York, Jonah Feingold’s feature debut after working in shorts and television for the past decade, is a film built from the scraps of its evident influences. The window dressing here immediately recalls Wes Anderson: the film opens with (and sustains) a…
The Birthday Cake doesn’t offer anything original, but its small-scale mob stylings will likely please a certain moviegoing demographic. If the Internet is to be believed, Jimmy Giannopoulos is a drummer and music producer who formed the American R&B and electropop duo LOLAWOLF with actress and singer Zoë Kravitz…
Luca is an obviously gorgeous film, but its half-cooked conception and execution continues the recent trend of sub-par Pixar efforts. The currently swirling rumors which claim that Luca is Pixar’s family-friendly version of Call Me By Your Name can safely be set aside. Sure, the film features two young…
Fatherhood isn’t going to be remembered as a comedy classic, or much at all, but given its rocky road to release, it could have been much worse. At this point, reiterating the havoc wrought upon theatrical distribution over the past 15 months is passé and redundant. But with seemingly…
CHAI’s latest continues to reevaluate genre boundaries with catchy experimentation and through sly feminist modes. CHAI is a band guided by an explicit mission statement. Announced immediately on their website and surfacing in much of their publicity, the Japanese J-pop-punk-house-rap rock band are celebrants of kawaii as it’s…
Beam Me Up Scotty’s reissue holds up as Barbie’s career-best record. Twelve years have passed since Beam Me Up Scotty was originally released, a stretch of time that has seen Nicki Minaj transform herself into one of the great contemporary pop stars with a sustained popularity fueled by…
J. Cole J. Cole is, somewhat inexplicably, really popular amongst hip-hop fans — and just about nobody else. He garners little critical praise from most music publications, and generates scant attention on a grander cultural scale, but if you ask any one of his die-hard stans where his…
The oner is one of the most divisive visual gambits in cinema, so the logical question is what makes for a successful execution of this maneuver? Is it the location of the shot, the images captured from the chosen setting? Is it the complexity of technique, indicative of…
Italian Studies Dislocation and dissociation lie at the heart of Italian Studies, a work straddling narrative and documentary, identified precisely through its rejection of stable, reliable identity. The third feature from Adam Leon (who previously directed comedies Gimme the Loot and Tramps), Italian Studies pivots into heavier territory,…
Summer of 85 is a weightless trifle, built on an unsophisticated narrative and featuring a patently ridiculous ending. The trailer for Summer of 85, the latest from Cannes perennial François Ozon, makes the film look something like Call Me By Your Name (2017) transposed to the crime-thriller key…
Every time I come back to Pinkerton, I feel the same hesitancy just before hitting play. Have I finally outgrown this record? Will the second-hand embarrassment of hearing Rivers Cuomo croon “smell you on my hand for days / can’t wash your scent away” be too much to…
2021 film fest season is underway, and with it comes a whole bunch of movies reckoning with last year’s lockdown and the still ongoing global pandemic. It’s hard to say what the value of these films will be in hindsight, hyper-topicality capable of being either a great source…
The Beta Test Over the course of now three feature films, Jim Cummings has established himself as the premier chronicler of a very contemporary, very specific kind of failson cringe comedy. As the writer, director, and star of Thunder Road and The Wolf of Snow Hollow, Cummings created…
In 2008, the Drive-by Truckers weren’t exactly a band on the ropes — actually, they were on a winning streak that no other contemporary American band could touch — but they were certainly a band with something to prove. For one thing, they were entering a rebuilding phase…
Tove disrupts standard biopic conventions and mines meaning from its language-heavy approach. In a 1946 letter to her love Vivica Bandler, Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson wrote: “I know you don’t believe there is an afterwards. How surprised you will be, Vi, when I come floating along on…
A favorite on the international festival circuit with a robust filmography of at least 40 films made over 50 or so years, Júlio Bressane looms large as one of Brazil’s most enduring experimental filmmakers, specializing in postmodern syntheses of the literary, theatrical, and cinematic that indulge in silly…