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…
Laird Cregar, a man with virtually no name recognition today, was, in his time, a popular American stage actor, one who was fast-tracked to Hollywood and appeared in a few box-office hits in the early ’40s, and who tragically died at age 31 right before hitting it big.…
Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung and frosty reaches of Eastern Russia has been slowly but surely building a robust regional cinema separate from the Russian film industry writ large. Sakha…
Scarecrow Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung and frosty reaches of Eastern Russia has been slowly but surely building a robust regional cinema separate from the Russian film industry writ large.…
In the Heights isn’t going to save the theatrical experience, but at 143 minutes, will help kill some time. In development since the musical made its Broadway debut (basically), a cinematic adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights arrives this week in the U.S., positioned as Warner Bros.…
Spike Lee’s 1991 Jungle Fever, a work with a title and subject matter seemingly designed to court — indeed, demand — controversy, is at its core a study of extreme contrasts. While Lee has been accused of a great many things during his four-decade career, being a subtle…
In the cinema of the filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s not hard to notice a motif of water that stands out across his work and often plays a crucial role. Whether it’s the seaside (in The State I Am In, Jerichow and Barbara), lakes and ponds (in Gespenster and…
The playfulness of Chantal Akerman is, throughout her work, always nebulous. A smile, a laugh, a tall-standing stride: these do not signify transparent gestures, so much as the ephemera that coat the quotidian and make it beautiful, elusive, and singular. In her films and writing, Akerman is a…
Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described as a “horizontal” story. Taken together, of course, the matter is quite different, and the resulting triptych has been described as a kind of…
Christian Petzold is a serious, even formidable cinephile, but that shouldn’t be confused for humorlessness. His referentiality is streamlined and polite, endearingly obvious, but only if you choose to tease it out, as he’s otherwise content to foreground the immediate virtues of each film, an approach that 2003’s…