Always and Forever is stretched a little thin and relies on too much filler, but remains a charming teenage rom-com and gracefully ends the trilogy. In some ways, the romantic comedy is the hardest film to resist — while they’re perhaps hit-or-miss at a higher rate than films in…

Night of the Kings thrives on both its powerful sense of artifice and brutal reality. Storytelling is at the crux of Philippe Lacôte’s entrancing sophomore feature, whose structural integrity depends upon a viewer’s willingness to accept its dramatic reflexivity. A mythopoetic work invoking the oral tradition of One Thousand…

A whopping 13 features deep into their cinematic partnership, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin were reaching a new apex of open acrimony in their relationship when they worked under the direction of Frank Tashlin on 1955’s Artists and Models, their penultimate film as a duo act. A miraculous…

The Future Bites is a post-apocalyptic dance party, one that grooves upon both our failures and our path to progress. Steven Wilson has been known to fans and critics alike as “The Prog Rock King.” But for the last decade, the British singer/songwriter/virtuoso’s output has been quite a bit…

Buck Meek paints an emotionally potent self-portrait on the introspective Two Saviors. Buck Meek follows up his 2018 self-titled solo release and a considerably busy Big Thief schedule with Two Saviors, a jangly, twangy sophomore interlude to the band’s ongoing, prolific discography. Recorded in a single take in…

Lucero Lucero has always found themselves at intersections; sonically, the southern rockers have incorporated, and reconstituted, elements of alt-country, punk rock, cinematic soul, and bluesy folk, which their albums reflect. A typical Lucero set peppers in a few slowed-down, stripped-bare ballad-esque tracks amidst more generally rollicking rock fare,…

Body Brokers is littered with fascinating parts, but never manages to pull it all together into a cohesive vision. There are at least four different movies vying for attention in the new ripped-from-the-headlines thriller Body Brokers, each of them potentially compelling on their own, but here awkwardly meshed together…

The World to Come is a narratively austere but emotionally and sociologically potent study of women and love under patriarchy. Set on the frigid expanse of the mid-nineteenth century amid material poverty and emotional scarcity, The World to Come finds, in its title, a feeling of spiritual profundity tempered…

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…

JUMBO manages to imbue its tricky material with sensitivity but at the expensive of teasing out much of its considerable potential. It’s not often that object sexuality (or, OS for the sake of brevity) is discussed outside the confines of lurid reality television, and as such, Zoé Wittock’s debut…

Episode Description: This week, Summer Blockbuster!?! celebrates Valentine’s Day by taking on one of the least romantic romances ever filmed: 1986’s Under the Cherry Moon, directed by Prince. The pop icon followed up his smash hit Purple Rain with a black-and-white homage to screwball comedies that plays like…

While musical virtuosity and compositional genius are indisputable bona fides for any great artist to possess, and are indeed the key ingredients behind any number of remarkable records throughout history, such elements aren’t necessarily requisite. This is a sentiment especially true when considering a unique and prolific era…

As Jazmine Sullivan’s first album in six years, Heaux Tales puts her talents on display and successfully ignores the standard R&B industry traps. Jazmine Sullivan has built a rather remarkable career for herself over the last decade, the sort that few contemporary pop artists are allowed the time to…

Jazmine Sullivan Jazmine Sullivan has built a rather remarkable career for herself over the last decade, the sort that few contemporary pop artists are allowed the time to properly nurture. This is, in part, because she was able to step away from the industry for a time, for…

Music is a generic, offensive slog that co-opts ASD in service of bland musical pomp and an imbalanced plot. Pop songstress Sia titling her directorial debut Music pretty much sums up the film as a whole: generic pap entirely devoid of depth or originality. It’s the equivalent of Bobby…

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is yet another time loop flick that fails to do anything to energize its exhausted conceit. Note to Hollywood: No more time-loop films. The concept has been exhausted, at least if the last several efforts have anything to say about it. It’s not…

Black Medusa In a thankless role as one of the most morose femmes fatales in memory, Nour Hajri plays Nada, a (mostly) mute office worker by day, serial killer (men only, natch) by night. We never find out why. Such is the pseudo-provocative premise of Black Medusa, the…

The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith that things will get better. Grief-stricken after the death of his wife, he seeks out Hades himself and is told: Eurydice will return to you,…

Bipolar The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith that things will get better. Grief-stricken after the death of his wife, he seeks out Hades himself and is told: Eurydice will return to…

Of all the different horror sub-genres, the zombie flick is perhaps the one with the most innate spectacle. With a few obvious exceptions — low-budget fare like Shaun of the Dead or The Dead Don’t Die’s Jarmusch treatment — zombie movies keep getting bigger, whether in pomp, scope,…

The idea of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, set in an ultra-modern Taipei with an all-female cast, certainly sounds appealing. As does the idea of transmuting Shakespeare’s Edenic Forest of Arden into an internet-free zone of play and gender non-conformity. Unfortunately, filmmakers Chen Hung-i and Muni…