By the time Chor Yuen’s Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan released in 1972, the image of wuxia in Hong Kong cinema had changed dramatically.…
Why does Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud continue to haunt? It follows from a distance and just when I think I’ve settled up — maybe three years…
During the summer of 1991, cousins Robert “Bobby” Diggs and Gary Grice were trying to get busy and do the impossible. They had both released…
Taking place entirely in the frigid confines of an Antarctic research lab, John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror masterpiece The Thing makes for exceptionally chilling post-pandemic…
On the occasion of Paul McCartney’s 80th birthday, I decided to burden myself with the unforgiving task of writing about the Beatles. After trying out…
Artist and critic Fred Camper once called Howard Hawks (and I’m paraphrasing from memory here) the “hardest to define of all the classic Hollywood auteurs,…
Stanley Kubrick seems like an odd filmmaker to claim as having underrated films. I’m not as great a fan as most cinephiles, but given the…
Saul Bass’ poster for Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1962) shows the dome of the Capitol neatly dissected from the building itself, the title emerging…
The late ’90s and early ’00s were a blur of bright colors and bubblegum. Pop culture felt shiny and good, like the entire world was…
Forgotten for several decades after its 1982 release, Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground was rediscovered in 2015, leading to a flurry of posthumous critical attention that…
Like The Slim Shady LP before it, Eminem’s fourth and arguably most enduring album The Eminem Show is receiving a very big, very deluxe reissue…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a filmmaker with a profoundly idiosyncratic streak that belies his reputation in certain quarters as a “mere” horror director. Consequently, most of…
There isn’t much left to say about George Miller’s Mad Max films. They’ve gone from the first entry’s scrappy DIY exploitation to Fury Road’s multimillion-dollar,…
In a 2006 article for the online magazine Senses of Cinema titled “Mapping Catalonia in 1967: The Barcelona School in Global Context,” Rosalind Galt attempts…
It’s hard to believe that a folk group created in one of the most inorganic of ways — that is, covering songs that were already…
Contrary to popular belief — or, at least, contrary to the ongoing narrative at the time — Person Pitch was not Panda Bear’s first solo…
It’s 1995, halfway through the decade and two years into the centrist liberal Elysian era of pre-blow-job Bill Clinton, a year in which Forrest Gump…
For some time, and even still, the accepted critical narrative regarding Spike Lee’s 25th Hour positioned the film as one of the significant peaks in…
By all accounts, Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II should have been a complete failure. Delayed for almost four years (routinely a tell-tale…
After releasing a trio of mildly successful albums, with even their eponymous third album almost entirely ignored by critics due in no small part to…
By 2004, a few distinct options were available to veteran country artists. The B- and C-listers could count on regular performance slots at either the…