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The Best of Blondie

“While other compilations have eclipsed this one, The Best of Blondie remains one hell of an album. The de facto and defining summary of the band’s power pop and disco-punk for years, The Best of Blondie is winnowed down to the absolute essentials. No wrong note and nary an ounce of fat to be found” read more

Greatest Hits: Sound & Vision

“Just in time for Blondie’s 2006 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came this combo release: one disc of greatest hits, one disc of music videos. Yet there’s a pervading sense of wheel spinning here. Other compilation albums have managed the neat trick of feeling complete, but this one” read more

The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story

“Even by the already slim standards of direct-to-video and/or made-for-TV Disney movies, The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story is particularly grim. It occupies a no man’s land between the animated film and the original text by dropping many of the inventions of the studio, no King Louie or “Bare Nec” read more

Extraordinary Tales

“This feels like a coherent animated horror anthology than a collage of Raúl García’s various influences and cinematic obsessions writ large. The inherent “cool factor” involved in watching short films of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous stories narrated by the likes of Christopher Lee and Bela Lug” read more

The Fox and the Hound 2

“The straight-to-video sequel franchise, a cannibalistic enterprise that the Disney studio has mercifully reframed from, is often a glimpse into piggybacking off borrowed shine. These films aren’t good or strong enough to stand on their own, so they shove already known entities into strange shapes ” read more

Cab Calloway's Jitterbug Party

“Cab Calloway’s Jitterbug Party’s is a perfectly serviceable musical short that needed some visual imagination to match the high-octane energy of the music and performers. Cursed with a point-and-shoot style that several early sound musicals are doomed with, Jitterbug Party nearly undermines the ” read more

Beautiful Girls

“At times over fond but rightly critical of the stunted adolescence of these man-babies, Beautiful Girls still gives them too wide a berth for their ruminations on nothing in particular while ignoring the more intriguing female characters that reside on the periphery. Strange that the two most fascin” read more

Esteros

“Does it often feel like every other gay movie is about two men falling in love and one of them having a fraught relationship to his sexuality and object of desire? I get it, self-repression is part of the queer experience, but it can get mildly depressing to watch movie after movie detailing this pa” read more

Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party

“Stephen Cone’s queer films are well meaning if misguided. Here he looks to examine the hypocrisies of the evangelical sect, a fertile and ripe place, and do so in an empathetic and humane way, noble choice, but Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party is trying to tackle way more than Cone’s abilities as” read more

Tale of Tales

“For a while Tale of Tales plays out with the free-associative logic of a fairy tale and provides sequences that in an American film would lead to bombast with quiet emotional urgency. This is when the film is operating at its best, but then a certain thinness begins to undermine the film’s triptyc” read more

A Promise

“You gotta love it when an adaptation of a period piece in a European country that is not England winds up getting a very English makeover. Or not. A Promise is very much a headscratcher in this regard. Here’s a story that explicitly takes place in Germany pre-WWI but is cast from top to bottom wit” read more

Madame Bovary

“There’s something about Gustav Flaubert’s towering literary achievement that seems nearly impossible to translate to cinematic language. Perhaps it’s the insular nature of the prose? The way that its critique is both ambiguous and acidic, especially towards its titular heroine, maybe more like” read more

Roma

“Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is a memory play and a quiet documentation of the sublime found in the banality of everyday life. I wouldn’t entirely call the ability of the film’s images to transform the mundane into the cinematic divine ‘magic realism,’ but I’m not sure what else to dub it. Cua” read more