Our first dispatch from the 2019 New York Film Festival offers quick takes on a smattering of the festival circuit’s biggest films this year, including: the world premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Netflix-backed, de-aging spectacle, The Irishman; a trio of Cannes Competition entries — The Whistlers, Atlantics, and Oh…
At his best, Arnaud Desplechin is a mad tinkerer, creating weird, expansive narratives that follow dysfunctional people through the vicissitudes of every day life. He’s got a big bag of tricks, infusing typically staid, talky family and romantic melodramas with boundless formal energy and a willingness to follow…
Lifting a page from a varied litany of genre precedents, Jovanka Vuckovic’s Riot Girls envisions a post-apocalyptic world — brought about via virus, not zombies or nuclear war — where adults have died off and only kids remain. In a choice that’s meant to mirror various high school…
On Lost Girls, Natasha Khan sounds more free than she has since she completely lay her trust in the arms of another on “Daniel,” the lead single off her 2009 album Two Suns. Interim Bat for Lashes releases have found Khan growing more wary of opening herself up,…
Our seventh and final dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, our third, our fourth, our fifth, our sixth) is also our largest, offering takes on all of the features (and one long short) present in this year’s Wavelengths program. Here are:…
Our sixth dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, our third, our fourth, our fifth) offers an eclectic mix of takes: Terrence Malick’s return to more pastoral vistas, A Hidden Life; Venice award-winner Atlantis; Ken Loach’s latest social lambast, Sorry We Missed…
With Ana, Mon Amour, director Calin Peter Netzer is desperately trying to align himself with the great figures of doomed romantic cinema, from Rivette and Cassavettes to Bergman and Pialat. That’s certainly a bold aspiration, although given that rarified air it is perhaps unsurprising that he misses the mark.…
Our fourth dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, and our third) skews heavily Canadian: Atom Egoyan’s latest, lurid work, Guest of Honour; Matthew Rankin’s Midnight Madness entry and Guy Maddin riff, The Twentieth Century; Calvin Thomas and Lev Lewis’s White Lie;…
Our third dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, and here’s our second) includes more TIFF world premieres than any of our others so far: Armondo Iannucci’s Dickens adaptation, The Personal Life of David Coppefield; Alice Winocour’s astro not-in-space movie Proxima; the Kevin Phillips-directed…
Depiction of extreme pain is not the most distressing thing about Finnish BDSM comedy Dogs Don’t Wear Pants. Frequent scenes of a dominatrix strangling a bereaved man until he’s near death don’t even register as outré after the first time. No, what’s hardest to swallow about Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää’s third…
Our first dispatch from the 2019 Toronto Film Festival (which runs from Sept. 5 – 15) finds us finally catching up with a lot of titles from this year’s Cannes Film Festival (Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the Dardennes’ Young Ahmed, and Michael…
If there’s any one quality that defines Cui Jian, it’s that he has never been content to be any one thing. Rock ‘n’ roll didn’t start with Cui — so he had to be a Chinese rock ‘n’ roller, fusing his own national identity and cultural and musical…
Cui Jian’s status as a cultural icon was largely staked on the reputation of his first breakout song, “Nothing to My Name”: its progression from televised debut at a 1986 stadium show to anthem of the 1989 student protesters in Tiananmen Square. The song’s formula — a kind…
Set in the remote valley of Qadishi, in Northern Lebanon, Abbas Fahdel’s Yara is a limited, if verdant vision of quotidian life. Centered on an orphaned teen girl (Michelle Wehbe) — the title character — who lives with her grandmother, the film observes a tentative, tender courtship: Yara…
So what exactly ‘begins’ in Philippe Lesage’s Genesis? That’s a question that’s almost too deceptively simple to answer: love, of course (the film’s poster even presents its principle characters, Noée Abita’s Charlotte and Theodore Pellerin’s Guillaume, in the shape of an ‘L’), though unsurprisingly, this is a love…
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 In Review Online’s new monthly feature devoted…
Waylon Jennings may not have invented outlaw country, but with Honky Tonk Heroes he gave the movement its clearest distillation of purpose; its manifesto, its aesthetic framework, even its narrative vocabulary. Naturally, for a movement so rooted in myth-making, there’s an important backstory. Jennings, along with his pal Willie Nelson, was increasingly…
Our monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition of ‘country’ to incorporate all the permutations that the genre has opened itself up to, especially in recent years. We feel that there are…
Directed by Nahnatchka Khan and starring Ali Wong and Randall Park, Always Be My Maybe is a rara avis. It’s a romantic comedy with Asian-American leads, and that alone would make it worthy of attention. But this film does much more than just mechanically graft Asian-American faces onto…
Across three mixtapes preceding Chancelor Bennett AKA Chance the Rapper’s studio debut, an organic maturation, both personal and artistic, occurred. 10 Day proved a largely forgettable lo-fi coming out, but nonetheless anticipated Bennett’s marriage of linguistic eloquence and the drippy vigor of youth. Follow-up Acid Rap made good…