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…
The Deluxe edition of Eternal Atake adds a wrinkle of inequity to the album’s two halves, but it remains an fascinating document of Uzi’s evolution as an artist and individual. Eternal Atake (Deluxe), aka Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World 2 and Eternal Atake, is a project that lives…
Lil Uzi Vert Eternal Atake (Deluxe), aka Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World 2 and Eternal Atake, is a project that lives up to its loopy approach to titling, an act of anti-branding worthy of Lil Uzi Vert’s obstinate emo persona. This project began its life as Eternal…
Roar begins with a vertiginously disorienting prologue, as a manic handheld camera frantically searches a room before pushing into an extreme close-up of a frightened, tearful young face. The camera then quickly pivots to a first-person POV, and characters begin addressing it directly. Hurried whip pans become flashforwards,…
Seijo Story – 60 Years of Making Films I think it’s safe to say that Nobuhiko Obayashi no longer requires an introduction. For that we owe the Japan Cuts team a debt of gratitude. The Obayashi retrospective they programmed back in 2015, the first of its kind in…
Charli XCX has found her niche as an entertainer but lost her way as an artist on How I’m Feeling Now. How I’m Feeling Now, the latest release by British pop-star Charli XCX and technically her fourth studio album, came to fruition just under a month after its initial…
The New Abnormal sees The Strokes return to a familiar sonic landscape with a newfound lyrical maturity, to somewhat mixed results. The New Abnormal is the distinct product of a band that has tumbled through the millennium’s first two decades and managed to shake off the grit. The Strokes…
Lady Gaga Each new release from Lady Gaga following the Fame and Born This Way heyday is more disarming than the last — increasingly structured around an aesthetic idea with a commensurate conceptual looseness. With Chromatica, a 16-track LP divided into three segments with numbered instrumental interludes, Gaga…
Hamilton barely qualifies as a film, losing much of what makes it a stage success in translation, and its historical revisionism feels much murkier in 2020 America. In New York, during the 19th century, there was Broadway, which catered to New York’s more affluent citizens, and there was…
The Old Guard navigates familiar genre terrain but with enough punch to put the hetero white male actioner ethos on notice. Every big-budget action flick should be as effortlessly entertaining as The Old Guard. Written by Greg Rucka, adapted from his own comic book co-created with Leandro Fernandez, and…
Ever since H.G. Wells unleashed The Time Machine upon the world in 1895, artists have used the conceit to impart important life lessons, waxing broadly on everything from mortality to regret to the meaning of existence. Wells was the first to offer a science-based vision of the theoretical…
The title of Myanmar-born, Taiwan-based Midi Z’s fourth fiction feature, The Road to Mandalay, conjures Kipling-esque Orientalist visions of the far east. But this starkly rendered yet poetic film offers the exact opposite, focusing on characters forced to navigate the merciless present-day realities of national borders, law-enforcement corruption, and rampant…
MS Slavic 7 is an ambiguous, mechanistic work that seeks to understand the divide (and bridge) between passion and scholarship. Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s low-key, documentary-style drama MS Slavic 7 is about a young woman, Audrey (Campbell), who discovers her late, great-grandmother Zofia Bohdanowiczowa’s passionate letters to a…
Aviva has the distinct feel a Personal™ film, and one that mistakes gimmickry for depth at every turn. Boaz Yakin has had a bizarre career, a textbook case (or cautionary tale) of a young, independent director struggling to finance personal films while finding steady work in the Hollywood machine.…
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…
To understand the ostensible intent of Jon Stewart’s latest film, Irresistible, it’s best to begin at the end: “Money lived happily ever after…reveling in its outsized influence over American politics,” a postscript reads. This is a uniquely unifying idea in contemporary America, one that all but the most…
There’s a willful naivete many cinephiles employ when attempting to wax poetics about “the theater-going experience,” one that blatantly ignores sociopolitical and economic dimensions in favor of embracing the notion that because one has the financial means to A). reside in a city that provides you access to…