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Singles 1969 – 1981

“Blender dubbed them the “masters of soft rock,” and that sums it up about as neatly as possible. Karen Carpenter’s voice had a resignation, a fatigue towards romantic labors lost and a haunting quality that gave an edge to even the sappiest of songs. That haunted vocal texture made “Sing” ” read more

No Country for Old Men

“The Coens truly crafted a film that reflected the spartan, near-Biblical prose of Cormac McCarthy with this adaptation. Just as McCarthy’s novels are sparsely punctuated, filled with austere violence, and alternately terse and brusque, so too is No Country for Old Men. The whole thing plays out li” read more

My Beautiful Launderette

“Quite possibly the most well-adjusted film about racism, homophobia, cultural identity, and conservative economic policies punching down ever made. My Beautiful Launderette is simultaneously about all these things and none of them as it doesn’t place any moral judgment or imperative upon any of th” read more

Control: The Remixes

“When Ms. Jackson barked out “Gimme a beat!” at the start of “Nasty,” she clearly meant it if this remix album is any indication. Not only has her long career as pop provocateur been filled with thick, sleek beats, but a sense that more is better. Let’s face the facts, Janet’s always been” read more

You Can Dance

“To quote Blender on You Can Dance’s questionable usefulness: “since when was it difficult to dance to Madonna records?” Yet here is 1987’s remix album/compilation, a stopgap and money-machine if ever there was one. Ever the control freak, Madonna hated it when others remixed her material, so” read more

Performance

“There sure is a lot swirling around in Performance, but I’m not convinced it all adds to much of anything. Performance seems more content in throwing its ideas around and not to engage with them in any meaningful way, and it all becomes a sensory overload before the end. Although, calling it the e” read more

Something Wild

“John Waters described Kitten with a Whip as “a failed art film,” and I think that description can carry over to Something Wild, the obscure tale of a cinematic sexpot emoting after sexual trauma and trading one abusive relationship for another. There’s something wonderful underneath the hyster” read more

Craig's Wife

“Thank god Dorothy Arzner made Craig’s Wife instead of a male director. It would be so easy to tip Harriet Craig into a monstrous harpy and to side with the “put upon” husband. It would only embolden the patriarchy’s vision of marriage as an imprisonment for men with women as a controlling ba” read more

Christopher Strong

“I’m tempted to give a long, rambling preamble about the history and importance of Dorothy Arzner, pioneering queer director during the Hollywood’s studio era, and how her later reexamination by feminist and queer theorist salvaged her work from the dustbin of history. I’m refrain, but just kno” read more

Mother

“Poignant and absurd in equal measure, Albert Brooks taps into the conflicted push-and-pull at the heart of parent/child relationships. Vulnerable, pleading, and anxious in an equilibrium that’s daring to watch, Mother finds Brooks going full Oedipal complex as a man reexamining his life choices, m” read more

Always

“Steven Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss have both mentioned a deep love and appreciation for 1944’s A Guy Named Joe and discussed remaking it as far back as 1975’s Jaws. A Guy Named Joe is one of those heavily romantic studio era films that easily moved into magical realism territory. You buy into” read more

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

“The late 60s were a confusing, unmooring time for everyone, especially those expositing the virtues of total honesty and “free love.” Enter Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a comedy not so much about wife-swapping as it is about the confusion of the era of its making. “” read more

Uptight

“More fascinating as thought experiment than it is satisfying as finished film, Uptight is still a complicated, contradictory experience that’s worth the effort. How often do you come across something that’s an update of classic John Ford movie, this time substituting Irish revolutionaries for a ” read more

Moonrise

“The cycle of violence becomes an ever-widening gyre in Frank Borzage’s Moonrise. Less a violent story than a story about violence, and there is a difference between the two, where each successive action strengths that cycle of violence and chaos. The aftereffects of a parent’s death by capital p” read more

Gaslight

“Time to demonstrate my gay card as I speak positively over Gaslight’s two hours of diva in full martyrdom! George Cukor’s gothic melodrama about a naïve young wife being slowly driven insane by her gold-digging husband is a lot of fun. It’s as atmospherically cluttered and inky as a Universal” read more

Two-Faced Woman

“If you’ve ever wanted to watch a rigidly square peg try to slink into a round hole, then Two-Faced Woman is the film for you! It’s not that Greta Garbo couldn’t do comedy, she’s a sensation in Ninotchka, but that film built humor around her dour, serious iconography and found a sly way to su” read more

Little Women

“Louisa May Alcott’s oft-filmed story gets a wonderfully warm, charming, if rushed treatment in George Cukor’s celebrated version. Two prior silent film versions, from 1917 and 1918 respectively, beat this one to the screen, but this was the first version where all the disparate pieces came toget” read more

Our Betters

“Our Betters wants to both titillate us with its tale of the idle rich and their different rules for love, marriage, and society while finger wagging over amorality. It wants to build up its main character, an American socialite who married into the British upper class, while also slut shaming her to” read more

What Price Hollywood?

“While not exactly the foundational brick for the four official versions of A Star Is Born (to date, tick-tock on the fifth), What Price Hollywood? is still owed a debt of gratitude and payment when discussing those films. If you were to officially rank it among the four, it would slide obviously abo” read more

Total: from Joy Division to New Order

“Total: from Joy Division to New Order isn’t exactly the all-encompassing expansive set that its title would promise. Joy Division gets a meager five songs out of eighteen, and the last chunk of New Order’s section prove that they’ve been a confused legacy act for a while. I suppose if all you ” read more

The Immigrant

“James Gray’s passion play of a Polish woman discovering the American dream and its seedier realities and rot is built upon the silent era’s pantomime and impressionistic imagery and the melodramatics of the 40s and 50s. The Immigrant is a ripe film that manages to paper over its occasionally wea” read more

Butter

“Butter never goes as balls deep as it often threatens. It’s shallow thrusts at political satire, race, and conservative middle Americana and its weird folksy rituals. It’s dissatisfying as its climax whimpers out when it should shudder and scream.   I think that’s enough metaphorical sexual” read more

American Gangster

“Big, perfunctory, and obviously reaching for the lofty heights of Martin Scorsese’s gangster epics or Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series, American Gangster is the bloated sight of a former master coasting. Here is a wannabe prestige epic about a real-life figure that coasts along an unearne” read more

Experiment in Terror

“More of a director trying on Hitchcockian suspense and seeing how it fits than a film noir, Experiment in Terror strikes curious poses as it lumbers towards its ending. Far too protracted to keep the suspense going, Experiment in Terror in an experiment alright, but mainly one of the “woman imperi” read more

Murder by Contract

“While watching Columbia Noir on the Criterion Channel, I found that Murder by Contract snuck up on me with the biggest punch. Lean, mean, and enthralling, Murder by Contract is a nasty little B-movie that attacks you with more artistry and firepower than some of its more stuffy, canonized siblings. ” read more

The Lineup

“The first chunk must be endured before you get to the good stuff in The Lineup. Based on a popular TV show of the era, director Don Seigel is clearly enamored with his bad guy more than he is with the stoic cops from the small screen. Why shouldn’t he be when he’s played with typical live-wire i” read more

The Burglar

“I can’t quite claim this one as lost curio of the noir era, but there’s still some sweaty sexual neurosis and a leanness to the narrative that’s refreshing. That doesn’t paper over The Burglar’s messiness, like a sexual assault of Jayne Mansfield that’s disturbing now, and I can’t even” read more

Nightfall

“Jacques Tourneur was one of cinema’s great second stringers. A director who could make the feeblest budgetary constraints outshine its big budget brethren through sheer force of style and atmosphere. He shined brightest when his films were their darkest – Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Out ” read more

Human Desire

“A reunion of director Fritz Lang and stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame after the previous year’s successful noir masterpiece, The Big Heat, but this one can’t help but feel a bit like a cooldown. There’s plenty of style to burn and a delicious pair of performances to thrill as often as they ” read more

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

“Long gone is the muddied politics and visual poetry of Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, which found the titular kaiju providing salvation from humanity as a by-product of his own biological imperative to be alpha over all others. He wasn’t the benevolent protector of humanity as he became in many of To” read more