11 Best Releases From the Genre Music

Despite a challenging premise and an overlong runtime, the Hunger Games prequel makes the most of the hand it’s been dealt. The character of Coriolanus Snow is an odd choice for a Hunger Games hero. In the original books and films, as played by screen giant Donald Sutherland, Snow was a cold-hearted, cruel dictator clearly meant to echo real world fascist leaders. Here, in the prequel story The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (say that five times fast), Coriolanus (Tom Blyth) is just a sensitive, emotional teen dreamboat whose main goal is to provide for his family in the wake of the violent revolution that tore apart Panem, the country formerly known as the United States of America. Continue Reading →

The Trolls movies continue to indulge in their best and worst impulses in a third installment. The poster for this past summer's R-rated comedy No Hard Feelings had a reasonably clever tagline to explain the strained dynamic between the film's two leads. Against an image of Jennifer Lawrence squeezing Andrew Barth Feldman's cheeks, a single word is placed on top of each person's face: "Pretty" and "Awkward." Nothing revolutionary in design, but it gets the job done. Best of all, that tagline also makes for an apt descriptor for Trolls Band Together. Continue Reading →

Both the main characters in Michel Franco’s Memory are struggling to deal with the echoes of their past. Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), a recovering alcoholic and single mother to 13-year-old Anna (Brooke Timber), desperately wants to forget the unspoken traumas of her childhood. Saul (Peter Saarsgard), on the other hand, can’t grab a hold of his past. He’s powerless as early-onset dementia slowly but inevitably steals it from him. After their high school reunion, he wordlessly follows her home and spends the night standing outside her building. In turn, she visits him at the house he shares with his brother (Josh Charles) and niece (Elsie Fisher). Then she takes him for a walk and accuses him of participating in a rape that she endured at the age of 12, a crime that he has no memory of committing.  Continue Reading →

The audaciously titled Dicks: The Musical comes with an equally eye-catching tagline, boasting the honor of being “A24’s first musical.” That’s bound to intrigue cinephiles everywhere. After all, not every movie studio is trendy enough to regularly sell out of logo festooned merchandise. Or even make hipster merch in the first place.  Continue Reading →

Make no mistake, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, the highly anticipated film version of the career-spanning spectacle the singer-songwriter-popstar toured stadiums with this summer, is essentially a victory lap for her in the wake of massive critical and commercial success. Despite that, it still works because it never feels like what it could have been—a final cash grab for a show that already pulled in enough money to rival the GNP of several developed nations. Instead, it plays like a summation of Taylor Swift and her ever-expanding artistic ambitions. It makes a definitive case for her as one of the most significant musical artists of these times. And it has a lot of sparkly, sassy fun while doing it. Continue Reading →

About 75 minutes into Flora and Son, its script veers toward the self-reflexive. “What movie are you in?” Flora (Eve Hewson) snaps. “One without you in it,” her son, Max (Orén Kinlan), replies. This sort of exchange fits holistically into writer-director John Carney’s latest. It’s self-aware, sure, but it’s not meta. Like most of the film’s writing, it is entirely transparent in its machinations, going so far as to declare them at points. Supporting characters largely function as symbols rather than people. Continue Reading →

Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris begins in a café. Mia (Virginie Efira), avoiding the rain, sits and drinks a glass of wine by herself, surrounded by other patrons. A birthday party for a middle-aged man, a few tourists, a couple having an argument, all of the classic situations are present. After spilling ink onto her hand, she heads to the bathroom, cleans up, grabs her belongings, and gets up to leave, when the two people in front of her are shot and killed. Continue Reading →

Moulin Rouge! may be one of the most artificial films committed to celluloid. At every turn, it uses sound, color, setting, camera tricks, and good old-fashioned deception to create space between the audience and the material. And yet it ends up being as naked and guileless an ode to love as any movie of its era.  Continue Reading →

Look, I grew up a lonely gay kid. Locking myself in the dark and blasting Whitney Houston is what I do best. If Kasi Lemmons set out to make a divinely mixed greatest hits experience for Whitney fans to do so collectively, then she has certainly succeeded.  Continue Reading →

In the unforgettable Looney Tunes cartoon Duck Amuck, director Chuck Jones posits a question to the viewer. What is Daffy Duck? Are his qualities recognizable even if he was in a different body? Entirely invisible? The various visual manifestations of this fowl, complete with a consistent personality emanating from the character’s voicework and body language, make it clear that Daffy Duck is more than just one physical vessel. He transcends form. Continue Reading →

New York City. January 29th, 1990. Composer and playwright Jonathan Larson (Andrew Garfield) turns 30 at the end of the week. SUPERBIA, the dystopian science fiction musical he's spent most of a decade writing, is about to have its first-ever full workshop. It's a critical moment for Jon, one that could well make his career (or break it irreparably). If SUPERBIA bombs, Jon will be washed up before he ever set out to sea. To crank up the pressure, the show is missing a critical song, a tune that the whole affair will turn on. Continue Reading →