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…
It’s unclear whether The Haunting of Sharon Tate exists as an outgrowth of the ongoing pop culture fascination with Charles Manson and the Manson murders of ’69, or as a quickie, Asylum-esque cash grab meant to beat Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood to the punch.…
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…
If Gerardo Naranjo hadn’t already taken the title I’m Gonna Explode for his 2008 portrait of adolescent rebellion, it would have made a fitting option for Permanent Green Light, the sophomore feature from co-directors Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. Then again, perhaps that would have been too literal…
Radu Jude begins his magisterial I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians with actress Ioana Iacob introducing herself to the audience, announcing the name of her character within the film, and then bidding us a cheerful “I hope you enjoy the film.” More…
Though not wanting for the anticipated grisly violence or digressions into pop pastiche, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood might be Quentin Tarantino’s sweetest, most thoughtful, and most tender film in a couple of decades — at least since Jackie Brown. While Tarantino himself has criticized his third…
Sho Miyake’s And Your Bird Can Sing, based on a novel by the late Yasushi Sato, is sort of like Jules and Jim in Japan. The film version shifts the action of the novel from 1980s Tokyo to present day Hakodate. An unnamed protagonist (Tasuku Emoto, listed as…
The 2019 edition of New York-based film festival Japan Cuts runs from July 19 to the 28th (find the full schedule of screenings here). We are forever grateful for Japan Cuts for many reasons: there’s that Sion Sono triple feature they programmed back in 2016, which in large…
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is at his best when he’s unabashedly romantic. For more than a decade, he’s crafted ambient tracks that tend to brim with overwhelming sentimentality. In hearing his works, one gets the sense that every single melody has the uncanny ability to lure listeners inside its beauty.…
We’ve decided to do something a little different this year for our 2019 (so far) lists; instead of a formal poll, we’re using this as an occasion to plug some of the most positive stuff that we’ve written this year, with just a few fresh write-ups on albums…
Innocence and experience materialize in the poetry of William Blake as opposing forces; the former embodied within natural objects, passions and love, whereas the latter, like any good romantic, is found in the blackened corruption spreading across the land, engendering the extreme squalor of England’s industrialization. This kind…
The Chambermaid, the first feature from actress-turned-theater-director-turned filmmaker Lila Aviles, centers on Eve (Gabriela Cartol), a luxury hotel cleaning lady working in Mexico City. Part of that précis may sound familiar. But similarities mostly end there: While Roma’s central figure was an idealized, saintly figure with a hazy backstory — viewed…
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…
In her biography on her late husband — renowned Chilean singer/guitarist Victor Jara— Joan Jara recalls the days leading up to the impending sea-change in Chile’s political landscape, in the early 70s. The Popular Unity party, a left-wing alliance behind Chile’s then-socialist president Salvador Allende, was in the…
In an effort to reboot our music coverage, In Review Online has launched some monthly features devoted to reviewing new album releases. One such feature is Foreign Correspondent, a survey of new releases from the international music world — which, going forward, will now be published bimonthly. The latest issue…