In 1960, Merle Haggard was released from jail — he served a two-year stint in San Quentin for burglary. Before long, Hag started recording…
With Passages, American indie filmmaker Ira Sachs builds on the not-unexpected Euro-arthouse move he made with 2019’s underwhelming Cannes competition swing Frankie, which threw…
Like his (still-undistributed, in North America) previous film, 2017’s Walking Past the Future, Li Ruijun’s latest, Return to Dust (an official selection of this…
The real story with Endless Summer Vacation might be that this is the album where pop’s forever fickle princess finally finds her sound. In…
Iris DeMent likes to play the long game. When the Pentecostal-raised but avowedly agnostic 31-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, made her John Prine-cosigned debut…
An unexpectedly maverick prequel/sequel hybrid to one of the biggest mainland Chinese blockbusters of this century, The Wandering Earth II ditches the more rigid…
Thanks to its quite odd pairing of collaborators, Sick is a movie awkwardly pulled in two directions at once. On the one hand, you…
Quoth Christine Choy, the Oscar-losing documentary filmmaker, notoriously candid NYU professor, and pseudo-subject of Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s The Exiles: “You know, the…
Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale boasts an interest back-to-his-roots quality, but also affirms all of the director’s worst tendencies. Although The Whale is an adaptation of…
Glass Onion still has something of Johnson’s enduring interest in puzzles, but it’s unfortunately padded out with the shallow cleverness of endless pop culture…
The Fabelmans feels emotionally raw like little else Spielberg has made. Damn near every Steven Spielberg movie, in one sense or another, is about…
The subtitle for Septet: The Story of Hong Kong isn’t an all that accurate reflection of the omnibus’s breadth: These seven short films do…
Falun Gong deserves a more rigorous and sophisticated defense than the templated, trend-chasing Eternal Spring is able to mount for it. For a film…
The Banshees of Inisherin benefits from its lead characters’ unconventional dynamic, thoughtfully examining the ways in which individuals navigate the nuances of life within…
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a film as bifurcated as its title suggests: Documentarian Laura Poitras attempts to intercut a broad-ranging, linear…
As with a number of other quarantine-produced movies that have seen release since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Hotel operates…
Renaissance doesn’t rise to the heights of more personal records like Beyoncé and Lemonade, but it’s complex deep house influence still makes a persuasive case for…
There’s one very well-executed scene in mainland Chinese indie director Geng Jun’s Manchurian Tiger: Ma Qianli (Jun regular Zhang Zhiyong), a one-time-successful real estate…