#18. Rare is the artist in popular music with a sound that’s entirely their own; one-time Fleetwood Mac mastermind Lindsey Buckingham is for sure one…
#24. Siberia flaunts Abel Ferrara’s enthralling and fearless devotion to a uniquely dynamic (and specifically filmic) form of psychological expressionism — an approach that is…
Being the Ricardos would have benefitted from more fully committing to one of its many directions, but it remains a slick, emotionally dynamic film and…
Blue Bannisters is first Lana album in a while that isn’t exactly doing its own thing but it still presents occasional pleasures, even if it…
Try Harder! submits itself to a certain festival-friendly documentary texture rather than acting as a probing reflection of its sociopolitical environment. One of the many…
What’s more hip than mimicking the particular, diffuse, long-take formalism favored by many of the most acclaimed filmmakers in Asia today? How about having…
The Boy from Medellín’s early commitment to emotional and psychological honesty is ultimately subsumed by the doc’s refusal to engage on any political level.…
Cliff Walkers is a visually slick and violent spy flick that avoids propaganda and imbues its proceedings with considerable emotional and existential weight. Don’t let…
Imagine that your cousin steals your laptop (the dirty motherfucker), finds a rough draft of a project you’ve long given up on, and submits…
Think Spotlight but shot by Yu Lik-wai, Jia Zhang-ke’s favorite DP. Sounds pretty neat, right? And for a while, The Best Is Yet to…
Miss Anthropocene is the type of pop eccentricity that only an artist like Grimes could conceive of. Not since Bjork’s 1997 watershed Homogenic has a weird pop…
Like numerous other films from Mainland China this year, Derek Tsang’s Better Days has traveled a troubled path from production to the screen: It…
With U.S.-China tensions at the center of so much of our discourse, it seems as good a time as any to look at a…
Cui Jian’s music paints pictures: “A Piece of Red Cloth,” an anthemic song that Cui performed during the Tiananmen protests, instantly summons images of…
If there’s any one quality that defines Cui Jian, it’s that he has never been content to be any one thing. Rock ‘n’ roll…
Sometime during the tour behind 1994’s Balls Under the Red Flag, Cui Jian started employing the title of his most recent album as the…
By the mid-1990s, the political ambitions of what is known as the liumang generation — literally, “hooligans” — had devolved from a battle cry…
Cui Jian’s status as a cultural icon was largely staked on the reputation of his first breakout song, “Nothing to My Name”: its progression…