In Alex Lehmann’s Paddleton, Mark Duplass and Ray Romano play Michael and Andy, a couple of sadsack, socially awkward, loser neighbors who have struck up a friendship based seemingly on proximity and mutual apathy. When Michael is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he enlists Andy to go on a…
All Summer Long signals the beginning of the end of an era for the Beach Boys: the soon-to-be pioneers hadn’t yet ditched their upbeat, California surf-rock, but their ambitions — or more accurately, Brian Wilson’s — swelled beyond the sometimes superficial teenybopper hits of previous years. Their songwriting here incorporates a pensive emotional…
Brothers of the Night concerns a loose network of young Bulgarian men who, unable to find work in Vienna, instead prowl the city streets selling their bodies. The opening scene of Patrice Chiha’s film locates two young hustlers in a shadowy concrete overpass, one sloshed out of his mind…
The unconventional comedic drama Dear Ex has become a major success story for Taiwanese filmmakers Mag Hsu and Chih-yen Hsu. Nominated in eight categories at the Golden Horse awards, and winning three, this queer-interest tale deals with the fallout from the death of family man Zhengyuan (Spark Chen), who chooses to leave…
Dan Gilroy has birthed one of the worst movies of the year, a hapless art world satire that gives way to an inept horror film: Truly, it’s two terrible movies for the price of one. Velvet Buzzsaw introduces us to Jake Gyllenhaal’s Morf Vandewalt, a rock star art…
As we expressed in our other major 2018 catch-up feature, it’s a fool’s errand to try and cover every worthy release from a particular genre in a given calendar year. It’s even more absurd to try something similar for releases from every country — especially considering the wealth of rich musical traditions to be found all…
James Blake sings the quiet parts loud; now a decade into his career, his arc is best charted through the evolution, and presentation, of his own introversion. Blake’s early EPs operated as soundtracks for solo clubbing, while his subsequent reinvention into a singer-producer captured conflicted internal monologues and ruminated on self-confessions.
Any talk of this film would be remiss without mention of its legendary tagline: “He came into town with his cock in his hand, and what he did with it was illegal in 49 states.” Notwithstanding this audacious piece of marketing, Cockfighter was a failure, and the only…
In the U.S., the films of Japanese director Naomi Kawase have often been met with apprehension, not accorded the same respect as other celebrated works from the European film festival circuit. Perhaps this is because it’s hard to formulate an academic assessment of films that unabashedly invite intimacy: Kawase evokes sensuous experience more…
Serving as Meek Mill’s triumphant return from a long period of legal battles and L-taking, Championships is the rapper’s first album since his controversial 2017 incarceration — which stemmed from a technical probation violation for popping an illegal wheelie that cost him six months of his life — and is a work dense…
Trying to cover every rap album, mixtape, EP, collaborative project, and “selective playlist” released over the past year seems like a fool’s errand; in 2018 alone, between our monthly feature roundup of new rap releases, What Would Meek Do?; year-end listicles; and mid-year catch-up, we barely even scratched…
Despite his sultry, salacious crooning and all that iconic baby-making music (“Let’s get it on / Ah, baby, let’s get it on / Let’s love, baby”), Marvin Gaye was, in real life, not such a romantic. In modern parlance, one might call him problematic. He married Anna Ruby…
Toxic masculinity had a year; scan the top three titles on this list and you’ll find three films about self-involved men belaboring the value of ‘their art’ — made by three self-involved men belaboring the value of their art. That may seem like a dispiriting regression, especially considering…
Skipping elliptically across 15 or so years in an economical 84 minutes, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War tells of the tumultuous, postwar love affair between Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), a former musical director of a youth program in Poland, and Zula (Joanna Kulig), a fiery, talented young singer. Applying the…
Norma, the fifth album from Chilean pop artist Mon Laferte, opens with a chance encounter in a dancehall between two soon-to-be-sweethearts, and concludes with their eventual separation. While 2018 has brought a wealth of pop records for lovers on-the-outs (see: Ariana Grande’s Sweetener and Robyn’s Honey), what Laferte’s has over the others is a pronounced progression through each…
Red Velvet rose to prominence just as girl groups like Miss A, Sistar, and 2NE1 were disbanding, with a string of projects that showcased K-pop at its virtual best: consistent and cohesive, eclectic and eccentric, and packed with bright, bold hooks. There was a time when even their “summer comeback,”…
With the reissue of Park Jiha’s 2016 debut, Communion, the South Korean composer and multi-instrumentalist has gained considerable notice for her positioning of traditional Korean instrumentation in contemporary contexts. Park has drawn on jazz, minimalism, and ambient music to hypnotizing effect, and Philos, her sophomore album under her…
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. In this issue, we cover releases from Chilean pop sensation Mon Laferte; two South Korean releases, from…
Two years ago, we published Sion Sono: Love Leaves Destruction in Its Wake, an exhaustive review retrospective of nearly every feature film that Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono had directed to date. Tokyo Vampire Hotel is one of Sono’s latest releases — an eight-episode series made available for streaming in the U.S. on Amazon Prime.…
A young woman, fed up with her life of toil and failed romance in the big city, returns to her family’s small farm in the countryside to spend a year rebuilding her psyche in Little Forest, a small gem of a film. South Korean director Yim Soon-rye’s adaption of…