The Dark & the Wicked It’s unfortunate that Bryan Bertino’s debut feature was 2008’s The Strangers. The film is the 21st century’s best instance of studio horror, a legitimately terrifying vision that both afforded the director instant credibility and established impossible expectations. The Strangers’ formalism marked a filmmaker…
Dolan’s latest intrigues in deviating from the director’s familiar mode, but its busyness never fully distills into any cogent statement. Matthias & Maxime, the 2019 Cannes competition nominee and most recent film of Canadian actor-director-producer-writer-editor Xavier Dolan, will be familiar fare to those who have kept an eager…
An effort of self-serious arthouse aspiration, Song Without a Name brings nothing new to the table. Melina León’s Song Without A Name is representative of a lauded — and mostly corrosive — cinematic trend that’s grown in popularity over the past decade. In films of this type, aesthetic and…
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…
Manga and anime artist Osamu Tezuka has been almost universally praised for his works in numerous genres (romance, sci-fi, even erotica); his son, Macoto Tezuka, is a visual artist and filmmaker in his own right, but a more obscure one. Only recently, through the re-release of 1985 cult…
Alone John Hyams’ new film Alone is a minor miracle. A terrifically tense thriller pared down to the barest essentials, it is survival horror in the best, most literal sense, following an intrepid woman who tries to escape her homicidal captor, locking us into the victim’s point of…
Words on Bathroom Walls is emotionally manipulative and easy to mock but has moments that are genuinely affecting. Broadly speaking, film has not exactly been kind or forgiving in its depiction of mental illness on the big screen. It’s always a tricky endeavor, balancing the innate histrionics of serious…
Johnnie To’s Chasing Dream is a return in more ways than one. An earnest romance between an MMA fighter, Tiger (Jacky Heung), and an aspiring singer, Cuckoo (Keru Wang), as their lives and careers become inextricably intertwined, it is the Hong Kong director’s first feature in three years,…
Chasing Dream Johnnie To’s Chasing Dream is a return in more ways than one. An earnest romance between an MMA fighter, Tiger (Jacky Heung), and an aspiring singer, Cuckoo (Keru Wang), as their lives and careers become inextricably intertwined, it is the Hong Kong director’s first feature in…
It’s a bad sign that the only person attempting anything in The Tax Collector is also delivering a racist caricature as performance. David Ayer isn’t a particularly good filmmaker, but he’s certainly consistent. Since his Oscar-winning screenplay for Training Day, Ayer has obsessively tilled the same terrain of clichéd,…
Ciro Guerra opts for transcription over translation, and in doing so, loses the allegorical power of Coetzee’s novel. Ciro Guerra’s Waiting for the Barbarians is a misguidedly straight-faced bore, a literary adaptation that fails to find the story in the text. To understand the depth of the film’s…
Pedro Costa has long been celebrated for his loose Fontainhas trilogy, a series of docu-fiction hybrids made in collaboration with residents of the former Lisbon slum (it’s now been demolished). These are great films, of course, but like all artists, Costa did not stumble into a particular method…
“It has been quite a journey / From my driveway to my front door / It has been quite a journey.” Lil Wayne floats this observation shortly past the halfway point of his 13th album, and a litany of connotations can be elucidated. There’s a literal interpretation: Funeral…
Lil Wayne “It has been quite a journey / From my driveway to my front door / It has been quite a journey.” Lil Wayne floats this observation shortly past the halfway point of his 13th album, and a litany of connotations can be elucidated. There’s a literal…
Built to Spill’s latest is a celebration of Daniel Johnston that regrettably undermines the best of both parties. The ethical conundrum that surrounds Daniel Johnston’s cult celebrity has been poked at plenty over the years, though for good reason. Johnston’s output was enviable — scuzzy, lo-fi cassette releases…
Honey Harper Honey Harper isn’t yet a big name. But if you’ve had any exposure to the musician, you’ll know of his reputation as the modern torch carrier of Gram Parsons’ Cosmic American Music tradition. Born William Fussell, the singer was the son of an Elvis impersonator, and…
Haruhiko Arai is a four-decade veteran screenwriter and director specializing in erotic films, cutting his teeth with the legendary pink film auteur Koji Wakamatsu, and going on to become a key screenwriter of Nikkatsu’s roman porno genre. In more recent years, Arai scripted some great films for fellow…
Labyrinth of Cinema Nobuhiko Obayashi, who passed away earlier this year, on April 10, was until recently relegated to the periphery of cinematic discussions of legacy. His status as a master filmmaker — he humbly preferred to be called a ‘film artist’ or a ‘cinematic magician’ — was…
Yves Tumor’s latest realizes an androgynous vision of rock ‘n roll and continues their morphology as an artist. It’s hard to imagine an artist reinventing themselves while so successfully achieving a unified goal and message, but this is what Yves Tumor accomplishes on each of their records. In…
Phoebe Bridgers At this point, Phoebe Bridgers seems unstoppable. While Punisher is only her second solo studio album, she’s been busy since her 2017 debut Stranger in the Alps: first forming the supergroup boygenius with indie darlings Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, and then pairing with Conor Oberst…