J. Cole is, if anything, consistent: He’s dropped an album every two years for his past three projects; he’s constantly tried his damnedest to prove…
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…
The albums that defined the past year were projects that subverted typical genre norms and traditionalist views, making themselves hard to rigidly categorize in the process.…
In the early 1980s, as the West was succumbing to the avaricious allure of Reaganism, Taiwan was undergoing a profound, progressive transformation. The country began…
The central premise of Susanne Bier’s Bird Box sounds like some unholy (and unlikely) mashup of John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, without the stylistic…
The music that Gustav Åhr made as emo-trapper Lil Peep was confessional, misanthropic, self-loathing, bringing fans some solace just by showing them that their pain was…
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…
Ski Mask the Slump God is one of the most naturally talented rappers in the Soundcloud scene. His Busta Rhymes-inspired flow seems to trip over…
The “If young Metro don’t trust you I’m gon’ shoot you” tag has been a source for hip hop-related memes at least since it popped up at…
The closest work from this year that one can compare Vince Staples’s FM! to, stylistically, is Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You: Both are colorful, irreverent…
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?…
For those of you who haven’t followed XXL’s recent Freshmen of the Year lists, J.I.D is something of an anomaly. Where most rappers selected by XXL lately have been young Soundcloud…
Touted as controversial New York rapper/walking meme 6ix9ine’s debut album, Dummy Boy is also his second project this year — after hastily-slapped-together mixtape Day 69, a cash-grab milking the overnight success of abrasive…
On the surface, Anderson .Paak’s Oxnard is a little obnoxious. There’s the obvious aping of Kendrick Lamar’s voice (and sound) and the the jazz/R&B instrumentals that almost beg…
In the uncommonly crowded year of the female MC — with two projects by Cupcakke and other high-profile ones from Rico Nasty, Cardi B, Tierra Whack,…
Bodied ends with a needle drop: “Hi, My Name Is.” As explicated in our Kicking the Canon piece, Eminem sought to make a villain of himself on…
The first shot is a marvel — a quiet, lovely reverie that ends with a punch to the gut. As a young couple walk hand in…
Imagine a script development meeting where everyone involved in making Aquaman sat down to solve one all-important question: “How do we make Aquaman cool?” Now imagine…
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…
It’s kind of hard to imagine that the multi-billion-dollar Transformers franchise has never previously leaned hard on nostalgia for the beloved ’80s toys and cartoon series…
Tired of superhero origin stories? Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is here to fix that. The film’s nominal hero is Brooklyn teenager Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), who’s…