It often seems like we’ve let Lana Del Rey down at every turn. But she’s always been patient enough to wait for us to come around to her side of things — and kind enough to not hold a grudge against those who don’t…
Vampire Weekend were anachronistic from the moment they formed: clean-cut Ivy League youths writing exceptionally clear songs, both in terms of structure and recording clarity. Their first self-titled album officially dropped January of 2008, almost exactly one year before Animal Collective’s Merriwether Post Pavilion,…
A film built upon gay male hypersexualization overlaid with some hamfisted prose, Spring Fever turns the sadness of being gay and Chinese into a dry drama that does not say anything new about the LGBTQ experience. The film opens with a jangly driving sequence…
The recently released High Life is perhaps the first film by septuagenarian Claire Denis with a plot fit for an elevator pitch: “Robert Pattinson fucks in space.” Of course, one doesn’t watch Denis’s sensuous, involuted films for their plots, which tend to be shattered…
A Decade Of by Sam Thomas-Redfern Feature Articles Film
Unity of Opposites: Glass and a Decade of M. Night Shyamalan
It would be difficult to summarize the aesthetic of M. Night Shyamalan’s work of the past decade in one fell swoop, but there are a number of characteristics typical of his preoccupations which we can see as forming a link. He makes clear distinctions between…
True to its title, 2010’s Hahaha is very funny — amusing in ways that might even cloak its generous, searching ambition. The film follows two skirt-chasing, barely-employed Korean men: Joong-sik (Yoo Jun-sang), a depressed film critic pursuing an extramarital affair, and Moon-kyung (Kim Sang-kyung), a director…
Some directors spend their entire careers switching effortlessly between genres. Zack Snyder does not. He is an action director, and everything he makes emerges as an action film. Clearly he wishes to be seen as a jack of all trades, the kind of guy…
Will Ferrell is a very funny guy who has been accused of doing a certain type, a type he falls into easily, too often. I prefer to think of his as a coherent body of work. Whether macho man or milquetoast, Ferrell’s characters are…
“We’re all just trash, waiting to be thrown away…” Consider what it must be like to be a toy in the world of the Toy Story films. It’s all fun and games as long as your owner is of the age where you matter.…
“What’s the worst that could happen?” The smart viewer, upon hearing this phrase during a film, will cringe. This is always intended as a rhetorical query, yet the asking will invariably summon up the barrel-bottom worst-case scenario that the characters are doing all they…