Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019). Set near the close of the eighteenth century, Céline Sciamma’s achingly refined, French drama is about a female artist (Noémie Merlant) who is recruited to surreptitiously paint the portrait of a … Continue reading Then Playing — Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Judy; For Sama
It is a pleasing irony that Marriage Story begins as the legal union of the title is effectively at its endpoint. Theater director Charlie (Adam Driver) and actress Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) have been married for several years, working together on … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Five
Despite protests to the contrary and the little fact that director Martin Scorsese is just a few weeks away from the first shooting day on his next feature film, The Irishman feels like a closing statement. Of course, it is … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Six
576. Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Re·ac·tor (1981) Outside circumstances mandated a new approach for Neil Young when he recorded the album Re·ac·tor. His infant son Ben, his first child with his second wife, had recently been diagnosed with severe … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #576 to #573
100 years after the 19th Amendment women still have yet to achieve equality by Lyz Lenz Using as a prompt the centennial anniversary of women belatedly earning the right to vote in the U.S., Lyz Lenz offers an agitated and … Continue reading Outside Reading — See Yourself Here edition
Officially, “Cop Car” is the first new original song released by Mitski since the stellar Be the Cowboy, and plenty of music scribes have already touted it as a hopeful sign that the artist’s recently announced hiatus won’t be as … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Mitski, “Cop Car”
I admire Jordan Peele’s sophomore directorial effort for a lot of reasons, chief among them its overstuffed grab bag of fierce, pointed ideas. In Us, Peele heaves weighty social commentary concepts like chunks of glistening coal into an already well-stoked … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Seven
Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell, 2019). No one quite knew what to do with writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to the indie horror hit It Follows. A shaggy modern detective story, Under the Silver Lake plays like Robert … Continue reading Then Playing — Under the Silver Lake; Apollo 11; Joker
With a level of specificity that should be the aspiration of all filmmakers, directors Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego tells the long, complicated story of a crime family in Birds of Passage. Beginning in the late-nineteen-sixties and spanning a generation, … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Eight
With a graceful intensity, writer-director Joanna Hogg traces the rough surface of a romance in The Souvenir. Resolutely autobiographical (Hogg doesn’t take the usual director’s tack of downplaying the personal nature of her storytelling, noting she meticulously recreated her own … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Nine
Coffee for Two 