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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

BlacKkKlansman

“Where does one begin a discussion on a Spike Lee joint that draws immediate parallels between its recent history and our immediate present? I suppose you could start there, but BlacKkKlansman has so much going for it that it seems somehow the most obvious entry point. Here is a film that manages to ” read more

Made in America

“She’s a black intellectual! He’s a scummy car salesman! Together, they unwittingly had a daughter through IVF! Will these whacky two work it out and come together as a modern family? Find out on Made in America!   Coming this fall to CBS!   Ok, not really, but Made in America does play lik” read more

Crystal Visions… The Very Best of Stevie Nicks

“If you ever wanted a single-disc collection of Stevie Nicks’ work with both Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist, then maybe this is for you. There’s heartfelt intent behind the cherry picking of Mac songs mixed in with the obvious choices from here solo material, but the execution leaves somethin” read more

Cold War

“Watching this is like reading a Junichiro Tanizaki short story: you’re enthralled by all the ways that love can blossom into something toxic and obsessive. After all, we are witnessing a couple break up then crash back into each other’s lives repeatedly over a fifteen year span. It’s a slim na” read more

At Eternity’s Gate

“God, Willem Dafoe really is one of our most undervalued actors. Ignore for a second that he’s about twenty-five years older than Vincent van Gogh when he died and look at his performance here. He’s been this good for so long that it’s easy to forget just how captivating he is in close-up, how ” read more

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

“I was texting back and forth with a good friend about the film’s I had yet to watch in order to complete my yearly Oscar challenge. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was one of them. Not for any deep reason beyond it was on Netflix so what was the rush, really? I think he succinctly put it best in that” read more

Fire Song

“Does it mildly pain me to take a few knocks against Fire Song? Yes, it does. I mean, how often are you greeted with a film about queer native characters? I’m sure there’s more out there, but they don’t exactly leap out of the film festival circuit limbo into the wider world very often, now do ” read more

Mirai

“I love this movie for its premise but cannot wrap my brain around its execution. Ostensibly a family-themed animated film, I can’t picture this resonating with a child audience or keeping the adults enthralled. It exists in the no man’s land between these twin points.   Granted, the fantasy ” read more

Isle of Dogs

“The artisanal process of stop-motion feels like a natural medium for a director as fussily detailed and idiosyncratic as Wes Anderson. His handcrafted forays into the medium have produced two distinct films that both provide a melancholic, winsome experience. He manages to, as Chuck Jones once descr” read more

American Life

“The twenty years between her scrappy, minimalist disco self-titled debut and this release, her ninth studio album, is an eternity as far as pop singers go. You didn’t exactly see Paula Abdul, Cyndi Lauper, or Taylor Dayne maintaining the same amount of chart presence, if not outright dominance. Ma” read more

Design of a Decade: 1986 – 1996

“She was nineteen when she released Control in 1986, a declarative statement of purpose and proclamation that her brothers weren’t the only pop geniuses in the family. Janet Jackson’s “I’m a grown woman” mission statement seemed a little odd coming from someone that young, but her resolve a” read more

First Reformed

“Paul Schrader’s work is obsessed with men in perpetual crisis, frequently punctuated by acts of great violence. Rarely is the aura of his work so muted as it is in First Reformed, a late-career masterpiece from the purveyor of toxic masculinity in self-destruct mode. Think of the explosions of vio” read more

Damita Jo

“For allegedly being an expose on yet another side and persona within Janet Jackson that we haven't met yet, Damita Jo is pretty par for the course with all of Janet's recent output. It shares the wild inconsistency of All For You, the hyper-sexual murmuring of janet., and the autobiographical be” read more

All for You

“After a string of four genre-defining and defying masterpieces, it seems inevitable that Janet Jackson would stumble. No one releases perfect albums every time, but the drop between The Velvet Rope and All for You is prominent. The Velvet Rope was the sound of an icon seeking personal and sexual sel” read more

The Wife

“One of the blessings and obsessions of the cinematic eye is intensely observing the faces of great actors telegraphing conflicting emotions through the subtlest movements. It’s in the way a mouth may tighten while the eyes are trying to look soft and kind, or the terse body language that contrasts” read more

Vice

“I both loved and hated this movie. My feelings towards it and about the ways in which it tackles its various subjects has not settled with time. Vice is a political hit job, a takedown of American media, and an indictment of political dynasties throwing us into never-ending conflicts and quagmires o” read more

Ralph Breaks the Internet

“Let’s check in with Ralph and Vanellope after six years and see what’s new. Well, they’ve established a fun pattern of spending the day in their games, drinking root beers at Tapper’s, then talking the night away before repeating the cycle over again. But there’s a rippling in their friend” read more