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…
Thunder Force is yet another high-concept comedy collab between McCarthy and Falcone that fails at, well, being funny. On its surface, a film like Thunder Force holds promise. An original superhero concept in the present climate is a rare thing, but one that is female-driven and of the…
Is 4 Lovers both reminds of DFA’s appeal and evinces the diminishing results when they stray from their template. Death From Above 1979 seem to have found a comfortable groove for themselves over the last few years, releasing three albums since 2014 when the band reunited after an…
Carrie Underwood At no point in her career has Carrie Underwood hidden her Christian faith; after American Idol, and the coronation single that followed, both ran their course, her first proper single as a country artist was “Jesus, Take the Wheel,” and many of her long list of…
Funny Face works as genre deconstruction and cinema of a certain geography, but its attempts at explicit commentary are less successful. Tim Sutton is a director at least in part characterized by his pursuit of a sort of Kubrickian auteurism; each successive film markedly different from the last…
Under the guise of complacent nothingness, the characters of Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers manage to paradoxically enact and participate in sundry relationships, death drives, drug habits, clashes with authority, and everything in between. The events of May ‘68 sit at the center of the film, but its bookends…
When I was 22, my best friend and I lived together for a while in the apartment where I grew up. We were a twenty-minute walk from the subway’s last stop, in a neighborhood that was years away from any semblance of trendiness. My mom was traveling for…
Released in March of 1981, Michael Mann’s Thief is one of the great debut feature films, a fully-formed work that shows a young(ish) director firmly in command of the themes and aesthetic proclivities that would reverberate throughout a now almost 50-year career. Having found some success in network…
My Salinger Year is a gently romantic, old-fashioned love letter to literature and those irrevocably shaped by it. Philippe Falardeau’s My Salinger Year is the film adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s memoir of the same name, depicting the author’s year spent working for the literary agency that represented author J.D.…
Happily is heady, genuinely hilarious, and a work of impressive tonal balance from director BenDavid Grabinski. The law of diminishing returns dictates that, over time, optimal output will ultimately level off as new variants are introduced into the equation. The same goes for relationships; the feeling of euphoria present…