While not up to the standard set by T-Swift’s best writing, folklore still manages to remind that she is as keen an emotional observer as ever. The presentation, in both its marketing and its media representation, of Taylor Swift’s latest has taken up more space than the music itself…
Sufjan Stevens What exactly is Sufjan Stevens ascending on his latest album? Celebrity? Corporate attention? This current political moment? God? All that and more, quite possibly — though the 15 songs that comprise The Ascension’s 80-minute runtime aren’t really concerned with those sorts of particulars. Stevens wants answers,…
While perhaps slightly more superficial than a typical Morris, My Psychedelic Love Story is still another successful entry in the director’s continuing interrogation of late-1960s America. While perhaps not apparent in every film he’s made, Errol Morris has long been hard at work on the project of sussing out…
With Lovers Rock, McQueen mostly turns down his directorial affectations and let’s the film’s beauty and joy act as guide. Steve McQueen has always been a fine purveyor of potentially rich and powerful narratives, but he’s been much less consistent as their steward. His first three features (Hunger, Shame, and…
Superintelligence undermines its innocuous silliness and any potential rom-com aspirations with needlessly complicated stakes and a fixation on its own high concept. There’s a genuinely charming romantic comedy hiding somewhere within the edges of Superintelligence, the new Melissa McCarthy vehicle directed by her husband, Ben Falcone. Sadly, to find…
Monsoon is a poetic, aching work that details both the reclamation and awakening of one man’s lost identity. The alienation of a Vietnamese expatriate named Kit (Henry Golding), who returns to his ancestral home after a lifetime spent in Britain, is at the core of Hong Khaou’s Monsoon, an…
Dating Amber is a nice enough film in the way of so many other forgettable, generic coming-of-age efforts. Perhaps it should be taken as progress that films like the gay coming-of-age teen dramedy Dating Amber are no longer anomalies within the cinematic landscape. Strides have been made over the…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of…
Sound of Metal is not the sonic game-changer that its marketing once suggested, but it works marginally better as a restrained, if formulaic drama. Sound of Metal seems to believe itself to be part of some kind of sonic evolution in cinema. It isn’t. Darius Marder’s debut concerns Ruben (Riz…
The Climb is perhaps overly familiar but boasts a chemistry-rich lead duo and a winning commitment to its comedy-by-repetition mode. The Climb opens on the image of two friends on a French bike tour: Mike (Michael Angelo Covino, also acting as writer-director here) and Kyle (Kyle Marvin, Covino’s co-writer). Both…
Collective is a compelling portrait of bureaucratic inertia and stasis and a rich study in the difficulties of actual progress. On October 30, 2015, a fire broke out in the Colectiv concert club in Bucharest, killing 27 on site. In the following months, another 37 would die in Romanian…
Freaky is a playful and genuinely funny ’90s slasher revamp that boasts both surprising commentary and appropriately gnarly kill thrills. There’s a lot to like about director Christopher Landon’s latest feature, Freaky, in which a bullied high schooler named Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) swaps bodies with a sadistic serial…
Woody Allen’s long-delayed latest isn’t among the director’s most psychologically incisive works, but its minor-key efforts reflect a curious transposition of the director’s old-fashioned absorptions onto a modern metropolitan setting. Make no mistake — Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York is far from the auteur’s best…
Ammonite struggles to summon the visceral potency or emotional depth needed to tell its story. Three years on from Francis Lee’s terrific gay drama, God’s Own Country, and the director has moved on from the romantic union of two lusty male farmers to a 19th-century entanglement between a female…
As with any Herzog effort, there are pleasures to be found in Fireball, but the end result still offers decisively diminishing returns for the prolific director. There was a time when the release of a new Werner Herzog film, whether a new oddball fiction effort or a probing documentary,…
Jungleland is a deeply familiar film that injects little energy or originality into its template narrative. Max Winkler’s Jungleland follows bare-knuckle boxer Lion (Jack O’Connell) and his manager-brother (Charlie Hunnam) as they make their way across America towards a potentially life-changing fight in San Francisco. Joining them is a…
Lana’s latest might be branded as spoken-word poetry, but Violet still features the introspective lyricism, emotional vulnerability, and intelligent songcraft we’ve come to expect from the singular artist. The prospect of a book of poetry from Lana Del Rey might seem, to anyone familiar with the songs that made her…
Ellie Goulding’s latest sees her transition from pure chart persona to an assured pop artist. In the five years since her last album, the excellent Delirium, Ellie Goulding’s position in the pop music stratosphere has remained anomalous and nebulous. The album’s biggest hit, “Love Me Like You Do,”…
Lana Del Rey The prospect of a book of poetry from Lana Del Rey might seem, to anyone familiar with the songs that made her famous and her accompanying image, like a rupture in the delicate fabric of her chic Americana branding, taking her frequent references to the…
Fire Will Come retains a kind of documentary-based fascination even as it becomes clear capturing the titular blaze was the only real objective here. Oliver Laxe‘s Fire Will Come is a film built upon two contrasting modes. On one hand, there’s its ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere, seen most clearly in…