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Chinese writer-director Jia Zhangke is one of cinema’s truly great Wife Guys.
Pavement has always been a band of uneven proportions. Forever on the precipice of the big time, the group never appeared to try hard enough, to want to be understood enough, and their creative output—off-kilter indie rock that sounded both revolutionary and unintentional—was always a little too much. They helped define a decade of independent […]
Speaking onstage at the Hollywood Theatre, Mississippi Records co-founder Eric Isaacson recalled hearing the sound of Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan digging through boxes, searching for a recording made 20 years ago. Isaacson had called him to gauge interest in releasing the band’s score for Kelly Reichardt’s Oregon-made 2006 micro-budget masterpiece Old Joy on vinyl. “If […]
Modern life is a cage, masculinity is in crisis, Friendship is very much like I Think You Should Leave.
From 2019 to late 2023, Björk toured her immersive audio-visual concert experience Cornucopia around the world. The concerts clocked in at almost two hours, with the Icelandic goddess singing and dancing onstage the entire show. Sadly, the Pacific Northwest wasn’t a stop on the tour, but there’s now another way to experience the abundant splendor […]
Did someone order a sexy wraith?
As a director and screenwriter, Ryan Coogler has built a career as an unparalleled interpreter of other people’s intellectual property. With Creed, he became the first person who isn’t Sylvester Stallone to write a film in the Rocky franchise. With Black Panther, he nailed the near-impossible assignment of adapting a thinly-drawn Marvel character conceit—created by […]
All war movies are now anti-war movies—that is, if an anti-war movie is measured by the severity of its misery. This is an unceasing human imperative in art: to showcase our species’ darkest atrocities through a transcendent exploration of the suffering those atrocities inflict, but to go even more HAM about it than the last […]
Alain Guiraduie’s latest film Misericordia is a mystery, a comedy, a drama, or some combination of the above tags. But that label still don’t quite hit the mark. That’s the sneaky power of this French director’s work to date. Even his most celebrated previous film, the thrilling masterpiece Stranger by the Lake, avoided easy categorization […]
Direct Action has no characters. Someone may appear in one scene, and then, several sequences later, enter the frame again. Maybe. Direct Action never names anyone; it only shows you their hands—picking through a mud-heavy bucket, playing piano, or making a huge mass of dough, the camera locked on the pile of flour and pool […]
Who is this film for? I wondered, as a monstrous computer-generated unicorn yanked out likewise generated entrails with its pointy horn and tossed them into the air. Watching Death of a Unicorn felt like living the consequences of a late-night, stoned riff on that 2010 unicorn meat meme. The gist is: ”What if unicorns make […]
In this current boom time for horror films, let us once again praise the work of the city’s movie theaters that offer repertory showings—for providing access to both classic films of the form (education for recent converts to the genre, like myself) and some gristle for the longtime fans to gnaw on. The calendars for Hollywood […]
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