In an effort to reboot our music coverage, In Review Online has launched monthly features devoted to reviewing new album releases. One such feature is What Would Meek Do? — in which SoundCloud junkies Paul Attard and Joe Biglin run down some of the latest rap releases. The second issue of What Would…
“Jealousy is a disease / die slow,” Nicki Minaj whispers to her critics at the end of “Majesty.” It’s devilish — almost pure evil — for the star to wish death upon those envious of her success. Between encouraging fans to harass said critics and enabling the sex-offender…
Our third dispatch from the Toronto International Film Festival (here’s the first and here’s the second) includes our takes on a few hold-overs from this year’s Cannes slate (Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, Gaspar Noe’s Climax, Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun), a couple of mammoth documentaries (Wang Bing’s Dead Souls, Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana), high-concept films…
Anime visionary Masaaki Yuasa’s first feature since his 2004 breakthrough Mind Game (though kid-friendly Lu Over the Wall made it to the U.S. first), The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl applies the director’s fluid, warped, and dazzlingly colorful trademark style to a fanciful fable about love, fate, and the…
Japan Cuts—the largest program of new Japanese films in North America—just wrapped its 12th annual edition earlier this week. Our one and only dispatch from the fest this year includes a passion project from octogenarian auteur Nobuhiko Obayashi (Hanagatami), a new work from iconoclastic anime director Masaaki Yuasa (The Night Is Short, Walk…
The 17th edition of the New York Asian Film Festival came to a close last Sunday. We already published one dispatch from the fest, focussing on some of its “Main Competition” films. For our second and final dispatch, we look at a handful of other notable selections from this year’s program, including a new…
The visual style of young Taiwanese director Huang Xi’s debut film, Missing Johnny, bears resemblance to the once-prominent New Wave movement established by his countrymen Hou Hsiao-hsien (who’s credited as executive producer here) and Tsai Ming-Liang, with long takes and beguilingly subtle pans that explore space and give…
Yesterday, we presented our Top 10 Albums of the Year (So Far). Today, we do the same for film — which also gives us the chance to offer takes on some films that haven’t been covered in our regular Blockbuster Beat reviews. (In fact, not a single “blockbuster” made the list,…
All last week at In Review Online, we presented our takes on some notable (and less notable) albums from the first six months of the year. In this fourth and final installment (find the first one here, the second one here, and third one here), we present our Top 10 Albums of…
All this week at In Review Online, we’ll be presenting our takes on some notable (and less notable) albums that saw release during the first six months of the year, more or less chronologically. In the second of four installments (find the first one here), we look primarily at spring 2018 releases, including a career…
As InRO’s Lawrence Garcia put it, the best thing about film festivals is seeing something that will completely surprise you — and he and I definitely agree that The Dreamed Path is surprising. Angela Schanelec’s film opens with a couple — Kenneth (Thorbjörn Björnsson) and Theres (Miriam Jakob) — in a forest…
Michel Hazanavicius has somehow made a relatively successful career out of feebly imitating established genre tropes or broadly recreating old forms of filmmaking, with The Artist being his crowning achievement: a lazy homage to the silent era laced with as many eye-rollingly obvious references as possible. With Redoubtable, Hazanavicius now takes on the French…
In the 1990s and 2000s, Kiyoshi Kurosawa emerged as one of world cinema’s most accomplished and interesting filmmakers: Cure, Pulse, Bright Future, and Doppelganger (among others) are potent, arthouse-friendly genre films — or, alternately, genre-friendly arthouse films — that far transcend their J-horror marketing to explore, in indelibly haunting ways, themes…
The finest films of 2017 simultaneously offered us a respite from, and a deeper reflection on, our fraught and fractured social and political realities. In sharp contrast to our unfortunate tendency to segregate ourselves with social media-fueled enclaves and ecosystems that do little more than reflect our own thoughts,…
Commissioned as part of Nikkatsu’s line of Roman Porno reboots, and adherent to its rules, Sion Sono’s ANTIPORNO is, as its title suggests, a screed against the pornography industry and the false liberation it purports to offer. Via the sort of direct, crazed monologuing typical of Sono’s work, central…
The best songs and albums released over the last 12 months found a way to subvert a hopeless political reality, to move and inspire us by striving for change. A Chinese rap group broke through to an international audience; a singer-songwriter sincerely mounted a mournful reflection on the…
Guillermo del Toro abandons his recent efforts at delivering alt-blockbusters and curating photography for interior design catalogs with The Shape of Water. A mute-mermaid romance set against a backdrop of Cold War-era espionage, del Toro’s latest showcases typically gorgeous production design that actually serves a purpose: the film…
Perhaps in answer to fans who complained that The Force Awakens was just a collection of rehashed elements and nostalgia with a shiny paint job, Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, the might-be Empire Strikes Back of this new trilogy, is the most unusual and stealthily satisfying Star Wars-anything since at…
“YOU NEED TISSUES FOR YOUR ISSUES” reads a woman’s shirt near the start of Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind, the director’s second film from 2016, after the bubbly and earnest Lifeline. Or maybe what you really need, the film seems to suggest, is some good old-fashioned titillation: The woman,…
Ominous portents abound from the first moments of Joachim Trier’s Thelma: the film opens with the unsettling sight of a man pointing a hunting rifle at his daughter’s head. The man doesn’t pull the trigger, and whatever compelled him to consider doing so is left unexplained. In the next moment,…
Our fourth dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (here’s one, two, and three) includes the Chinese-American filmmaker Chloé Zhao’s docudrama The Rider, about South Dakotan rodeo culture; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers/Starman hybrid Before We Vanish; and Ben Russell’s Good Luck, a relatively normal (for him), 2.5 documentary about Surinamese gold…