1971

“Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us, only sky.” On October 11, 1971, John Lennon released “Imagine,” the opening track and first US single from his sophomore solo album of the same name.…

Jerzy Skolimowski had a distinctive output well before he ended up in London. He began his film career in his native Poland with three successive features from 1964 to 1966 — Identification Marks: None, Walkover, and Barrier — which acted as semi-autobiographical accounts of…

While he appeared in many of his own cinematic works (including one of his most well-known, 1968’s Razor Blades), multi-media artist Paul Sharits didn’t primarily produce work about people. He made films — including looping museum installations and dual-projector projects (the aforementioned Razor Blades)…

During an interview with Jump Cut in 1976, director Monte Hellman described Two-Lane Blacktop as such: “It’s a film about inner life rather than outer life. But it’s not a film about other films; it’s not a pastiche.” The final caveat was in relation…

Director Alan J. Pakula helped usher in a decade of gritty, morally ambiguous New York thrillers with 1971’s Klute, a nervy neo-noir starring Donald Sutherland as John Klute, a small-town private detective who investigates the disappearance of a business executive named Tom Gruneman. Tom,…

One of the horniest albums ever recorded, Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson is a 28-minute exhalation of libidinous longing. The album tells a Lolita-like tale, partially autobiographical, of the middle-aged musician’s fantasies about, and consequent seduction of, a 15-year-old girl named Melody Nelson, whose bike the man…

In Review Online has launched some monthly features devoted to reviewing new album releases. One such feature is Foreign Correspondent, a bimonthly survey of new releases from the international music world. | The latest issue of FC includes takes on two different acts from…

Ensconced in the forest, enfolded by lush, verdant foliage, a spider’s web glints, caught in the halation of the sun; the glistening, intricate pattern is one of the myriad beauties crafted by nature, but it is also a deadly trap set by a formidable…

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…

On February 23rd, Craft Recordings issued remasters of three classic Isaac Hayes albums, 1969’s Hot Buttered Soul and 1971’s Shaft and Black Moses. Each has been carefully restored and pressed to vinyl, the way nature intended, with their memorable album covers also meticulously recreated.…