Recent posts tagged review
2023
The Rebel (Albert Camus)
How can we live as a species, knowing now the temptation to righteous power will always exist even in (and maybe especially in) the best of us? And how do we let all that not get in the way of us getting very real boots off our very real necks?
Tri Repetae++ (Autechre)
"Far from being 'inhuman' or 'robotic', as was often charged in the early days, electronic music is thus a profoundly human art."
Blow-Up
Michelangelo Antonioni's classic of mod London gives us a man who spends his life looking without really seeing.
12 Monkeys
Terry Gilliam's paranoid time-travel labyrinth is less an SF film than a story of the fear of madness, but no less powerful for it
Church Of Anthrax (John Cale / Terry Riley)
This one-off collaboration between the former Velvet Underground member and a master of mesmeric minimalism yielded a record with only one really standout cut, but what a cut it is.
2022
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Chantal Akerman's singular masterwork observes three days in the life of a Belgian widow with a precision and unblinking patience that becomes all-encompassing.
American Psycho
Mary Harron's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's divisive novel amplifies its satirical power without making its protagonist into an antihero.
Arrival
An actual SF movie, not just a tarted-up shoot-'em-up, both because of the breadth of its ideas and how they are lovingly personalized.
Wrath Of Man
Closest in spirit to the bleak noirs of the 1970s, where the "good" guys are only slightly less terrible than the competition, and where everyone is staring down from the edge of the same abyss.
Titane
Julia Ducournau's Titane has at its heart a great tenderness, something you don't expect from a story about a sociopath who kills with a hairpin, then apparently has sex with a car and becomes pregnant with its child.
2021
Dune (1984) [2021 review]
The mere fact that David Lynch's Dune was made at all, and in the Hollywood of the early 1980s to boot, is something of a miracle. Would that it was a better adaptation of the source material, or just a better movie, period.
Pi
Darren Aronofsky's ingenious micro-budget debut, twenty-plus years later, holds up better than some of his bigger-budgeted efforts
I Love Maria
A kooky example of science fiction from Hong Kong, a cinematic world that has relatively little SF to begin with.
The Matrix
Twenty years later, the Wachowskis' digital fable still stands tall, outliving the slickness of the moment and attempts to misappropriate it
Mutator (Alan Vega)
The first of the posthumous releases from Alan Vega (of Suicide)'s vault, and it's a good 'un.
The Downward Spiral (Nine Inch Nails)
A look back at the most deliberately frustrating album ever made for popular consumption.
Tenet
At the end of the day, it's just a fancy excuse to shoot a bunch of scenes in reverse.
Machine Gun (Peter Brötzmann)
You know how Woody Guthrie has THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS on his guitar? Peter Brötzmann's reeds should have signs that say THIS MACHINE KILLS, PERIOD.
Sexy Beast
Ben Kingsley as a frothing mad gangster is only the first of many pleasures in this sleeper-gem of a crime drama that's only gotten better with age
Apocalypse Now: Final Cut
The film is worthy of the best kind of jealousy, the kind that makes you want to go out and do something just as visionary and overwhelming.
Superunknown (Soundgarden)
When I'm happy, this record reminds me of what I'm transcending; when I'm not, it reminds me of how to transcend.
2020
Goodfellas
One of the greatest of American films generally, and certainly the most incisive and insightful one about the criminal life.
The Anatomy Of Addiction (God)
A thunderous fusion of jazz and industrial rock, way out of print but absolutely worth seeking out.
The Process (Skinny Puppy)
"The album that killed Skinny Puppy", an only partly realized concept record about a cult movement, has much to recommend it after 25 years.
Man Against Myth (Barrows Dunham)
Barrows Dunham's 1947 work of popular philosophy deserves the widest possible audience in 2020.
