Sticking to a reliable and remarkably elastic formula, the Coen brothers’ 1950s Hollywood farce Hail, Caesar! is, like Burn After Reading or Raising Arizona, another deceptively fluffy screwball comedy belying a search for deeper meaning. Josh Brolin stars as Harry Mannix, head of production and fixer for Capitol Studios (certainly not coincidentally the same…
A typical year spent traversing the cinematic landscape results in straddling some kind of line: one foot confidently marches off into the future while the other remains firmly planted in the past. Innovation is an organic byproduct of any artform, but so is adherence to a certain classicism, and 2015 was particularly emblematic of…
Evaluating performances is such a deeply subjective endeavor that finding a meaningful consensus can often feel like an impossibility. Truly extraordinary ones tend to work in lockstep with their respective films in ways that less impactful ones don’t, but in these cases sometimes that means our love of a given…
This was the year when the biggest artists on the planet spent more time than anyone’s patience would allow teasing albums that never came. Kanye, Rihanna, Drake, Frank Ocean, there were even Beyoncé rumors for awhile—none showed up to the album party, and in retrospect it’s not hard…
It’s true, we didn’t really cover music all that extensively in 2015 (unless reviews of a 10-disc set of live Brad Mehldau material and a 4Minute EP cover the extent of music that mattered to you in 2015, which hey, we feel you), but we’re hoping to rectify this in…
Like someone’s old love letters or the keepsake wilted flowers of a first love, Carol has the feel of a kind of attic picture that’s been sitting and collecting dust for years, an appropriate matching of form and function. Shot on grainy 16mm, director Todd Haynes prefers a…
The biggest surprise of Brooklyn is how determinedly sweet it remains to the end, its period vibrancy bordering on the genteel. In navigating the push-pull narrative of Eilis (Saoirse Ronan), a young Irish girl who relocates to New York in the early ’50s, director John Crowley leaves little doubt as to what’s in…
One of the brainiest guys in jazz, Brad Mehldau is likened to classical composers as often as he is boppin’ piano men; he is famous for his heady liner notes, and nearly everything he does comes with a conceptual thrust. So if Brad Mehldau is going to make…
After surviving multiple rounds of teenage gladiatorial combat, inadvertently inciting an armed uprising, and becoming a media darling and symbol for revolt against a tyrannical dictatorship, Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, but you knew that) is tired of all the killing. But when the leader of…
The re-emergence of the culinary arts as part of the zeitgeist has been an evolving narrative for the past decade, most noticeably found on the small screen with fully-dedicated cable channels and network reality shows. Burnt banks on this built-in relevancy and familiarity in telling the story of…
Guillermo del Toro’s sympathies have always been with his orphan, discarded monsters: the aging vampire in Cronos, the beautiful, malevolent creatures of Pan’s Labyrinth, or the dying fairy kingdom of Hellboy II. They may be cruel and violent but they are also irreparably misunderstood, tragically separate from us, forever unloved, forced…
At the core of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinema is a deep investment in the rift formed between an independent Taiwan and a possessive mainland China. Tender stories of unrequited romance (Three Times, Flowers of Shanghai) become bracingly political, and coming-of-age stories (The Boys from Feng Kuei, Millennium Mambo) gain the added…
Perhaps sensing that he couldn’t push his electric mayhem any further, Bob Dylan retreated from his wild, boozy rock and roll with John Wesley Harding, returning to largely acoustic arrangements but — crucially — not to the sound of The Times They Are a-Changin’ or The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. For one thing, these are full-band recordings, albeit sparsely arranged…
Though Days of Being Wild is Wong Kar-Wai’s second feature, in many ways it’s a film of firsts. It’s his first collaboration with Christopher Doyle (arguably the most important director/cinematographer partnership in modern cinema), his first brush with building a stock company of performers, and perhaps most importantly, his first film…
The Coen Brothers have a habit of using an innocuous object as a catalyst for many of their convoluted plots. This is slightly different from Hitchcock’s favored “MacGuffin,” the thing everybody in the story wants though nobody really cares what it is. Think of the stolen car in Fargo,…
2012’s Magic Mike got a lot of folks into the theater on the promise of a fun romp about male strippers, then, along with all that hunky flesh, also served them a post-2008 financial collapse story about the breakdown of personal relationships reduced to economic exchanges. It eventually turned into…
Purple Rain begins with a funeral, but not with mourning: It’s a celebration — a gateway into new life and a new world, where “you can always see the sun.” It’s a repudiation of evil and of finality, in the form of wild abandon. It ends with a baptism; leading up…
Rarely has a film’s meaning been so contingent on purposefully disconcerting stylistic contrivances. In Fallen Angels, Wong Kar-wai and his longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle use their collaborative efforts to create an urban environment that feels at once hermetically sealed and overwhelmingly expansive. Not just a mere portrayal of the Hong Kong…
Though the cumulative impact of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is considerable, and its achievement is towering, it remains a strangely difficult record to discuss by way of synopsis or generalization; there’s simply no way to avoid digging into specific virtues of its songs, because the songs represent the sum total…
The boozy, bloozy, cacophonous conclusion to Bob Dylan’s mid-60s “electric” trilogy, Blonde on Blonde feels every bit the culmination of…something. A wild fever dream of an album, owing as much to Fellini and T.S. Eliot as to Woody and Leadbelly, it’s the sound of Dylan’s imagination pushed to the edge, perhaps…
There are a lot of superhero movies these days, evidently the subject of much critical handwringing. Maybe they’re poisoning popular cinema — bloated advertisements for themselves draining resources and eyeballs away from more worthy fare. Or maybe they’re just the latest pop trend, no different from the glut of westerns…