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“You want a single disc assortment of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ combination of tear-stained love songs and straight-up party starters? Then seek out The Ultimate Collection, a compilation of twenty-five songs covering all the biggest hits, some lesser known greats, and a smattering of smart” read more
“They were created by music impresario Malcolm McLauren, he who also created the Sex Pistols and managed/advised groups like the Slits and New York Dolls, crafted Bow Wow Wow in 1980 after several members of the Ants left Adam Ant behind. He found a then-teenaged Annabella Lwin singing at a dry clean” read more
“Before he was part of Patti Smith’s seminal punk group, Lenny Kaye assembled Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965 – 1968 for Elektra Records. Kaye was a music writer and producer at the time, and his vision for Nuggets was a series of eight installments focusing on di” read more
“Look, just because Get Out is a dark satire about white supremacy doesn’t mean that it should be classified as a “comedy.” You hear my Golden Globes voters? Sure, there’s comedic elements, but there’s also too many psychological torments, scenes of abstract and real horrors, and a reckonin” read more
“Mudbound is the sight of a filmmaker evoking the power and fury of William Faulkner’s prose. Not only in the ways that the land itself becomes a harsh character, both unmovable by the sorrows of its characters and unrelenting in its unending withholding, but in its intense examination of generatio” read more
“Never has coming out been such a non-event as it is in North Sea Texas. There’s something refreshing about that, but that’s also part of the problem. Despite there being a pileup of occurrences and incident, nothing seems to matter in the life of the main character, Pim (Jelle Florizoone). ” read more
The Crystals Sing the Greatest Hits, Volume 1
“The Crystals Sing the Greatest Hits, Volume 1 sure enough lives up to that mouth-full of a title, but ol’ Phil is at it again. A whopping four songs here are actually the Ronettes, and there’s no mistaking Ronnie’s voice as a heretofore anonymous member of the group suddenly thrust to the lead” read more
“Twist Uptown, both the Crystals and Phil Spector’s first full-length album, was released in early 1962. In 1963, the album was repackaged with the smash hit “He’s a Rebel,” strong follow-up “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” and aborted single “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” replacing s” read more
“It’s not quite the Wall of Sound just yet, but the foundations are clearly being scoped and the bricks picked out. Twist Uptown was the first full-length album from super-producer Phil Spector, and it’s a solid historical document as well as being a uniformly strong pop album. Not quite a master” read more
“Despite what you might believe, Jennifer Lopez’s voice was never the thing that launched her brief foray as a pop diva. Pop music is dependent upon a personality, which she had, and a look, she was the antithesis to the skinny bleached blonde pop girls. That’s how La Lopez got the number one mov” read more
“The Lashes debut album, Get It, is an infectious romp, but unlike their contemporaries Hot Hot Heat, the Strokes or Rooney, the Lashes sound like they’re aping their own generation. It’s not terrible; it’s harmless and very safe, but a lot of fun while it lasts. You won’t remember much of i” read more
Every Breath You Take: The Classics
“White boy reggae never sounded as good as it did with the Police’s barrage of stellar singles throughout the early 80s. Every Breath You Take: The Classics lives up to that subtitle even if the track listing is missing a few gems (“So Lonely,” “Synchronicity II,” “The Bed’s Too Big Wit” read more
“The Best of Village People displays that they were a great party band, and a reminder of just how silly, camp, and dumb they were. Their songs remain anthems for stadiums and awkward drunken dancing at wedding receptions. Come on, everyone’s had to suffer through watching their older relatives emb” read more
“Paul Thomas Anderson traffics in films that are purposefully oblique. They are sustained on mood, on character, on a ripeness of visual poetry that recalls the titans of cinema in a way that refracts them like a funhouse mirror. Phantom Thread, for all of its straight-ahead narrative propulsion, is ” read more
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
“Treating prickly subject matter with a carelessness and shock-and-awe grandstanding does not a great film make. No, no amount of verbal pyrotechnics about topics like racism, sexism, and culpability can mask the fact that Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is flippant about things like charac” read more
“Seeing Cartoon Saloon attached to a new animated film perks my interest up just as much as seeing one coming out from Laika. Cartoon Saloon produced what are two of my favorite modern animated films, The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, so seeing their geometric animation style in the promotiona” read more
“Sometimes truth is infinitely stranger than fiction. Case in point, look at the romantic comedy interrupted that is The Big Sick. Loosely based on the real life courtship between co-writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, The Big Sick is a thoughtful examination of the ties that bind us togethe” read more
“On the periphery of Disney World there’s a little motel called Magic Castle, and it is here that we begin our story. It’s the summer, and we’re quickly introduced to Moonee (Brooklynn Prince, a stunner of a child actor’s performance), a six-year-old heavily interested in playtime, imaginatio” read more
“For better or for worse, Molly’s Game is Aaron Sorkin with the firehose going at full blast. If you’re a fan of Sorkin and his many –isms, then you’ll be in for a cinematic treat as there’s nearly two and a half hours of rapid-fire dialog to get through. If, like me, you’re something of ” read more
“The biggest problem with All the Money in the World is that its anchoring presence, that of billionaire J. Paul Getty, is just not interesting enough as presented here. He’s clearly meant to a figure of mythological proportions, and Christopher Plummer is valiantly trying to play him as such, but ” read more
“The Disaster Artist is pitched somewhere between star vanity project and reminder of what a gifted comedic actor it’s lead is, so think of it as something that encapsulates James Franco as a whole. It becomes something of an ego-stroking endeavor, as just about anything Franco touches inevitably d” read more
“There’s an uneasy tension laced throughout I, Tonya, as if the film is replicating the complicated athletic moves of its focus and it just as often fumbles the landing. Yet there’s still something absorbing and enthralling about it way it throws everything out there, class warfare, ambition, ath” read more
“Proof that an exciting concept is not enough to build a movie off of when you forget to populate with something beyond stimulating visuals. Loving Vincent is more of a film’s theory than an actuality, and it borrows artistic ambition and merit by piggybacking onto van Gogh’s work. Paintings that” read more
“The full complexity of a mother/daughter relationship gets a workout in Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s debut as a writer-director. It’s a disarming charmer, and one that’s fully committed towards narrative sympathy for its variety of characters. It’s equally likely to make you laugh as it is to m” read more
“Other than a brief detour into Roald Dahl’s literary work, Steven Spielberg seems particularly obsessed with exploring American values in his recent films. Lincoln looked at politics in action, Bridge of Spies was a Cold War thriller, and The Post delves into the newspaper business, more specifica” read more
“During the earliest writing sessions for Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson turned to his then-wife and said, “I’m gonna make the greatest album! The greatest rock album ever made!” Inspired by the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, a record that he believed to have no-filler, Wilson wanted to top it, to bring a n” read more
“Why do these thin children’s stories get blown out of proportion for feature length films? The greatness of something like The Story of Ferdinand is how such a slim story manages to pack such heart and emotion, and expanding it eventually means the studio enforced aesthetics takeover. That means w” read more
“Darkest Hour from the other side, and with many of the same problems as that film, Dunkirk is possibly director Christopher Nolan’s most emotionally distant and perfunctory film. There’s some bravura sequences scattered throughout, but great individual sequences do not a great film make. Dunkirk” read more
“You can take one look at the trailer or promotional materials and know exactly what type of movie Darkest Hour is. Handsomely mounted in that generic prestige way, it exists merely as a vehicle for a great actor to give a commendable performance as a real life figure and clean up at awards season. T” read more
“Guillermo del Toro’s entire career has been built on a profound empathy for the monsters and the outsiders, sometimes metaphorically, quite often literally, and that goes to a logical extreme in The Shape of Water. Imagine Creature from the Black Lagoon played out as a Beauty and the Beast-style r” read more