Kate Bush’s resurgent post-Stranger Things career just keeps running up new hills: The British singer-songwriter is among the 14 2023 nominees for induction in the The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
26.01.2023 - 01:07 / theplaylist.net
Caught somewhere between a movie and a series, “Willie Nelson & Family” doubles down on the history and mythology of its namesake to stretch the latter into what would have been better served as the former. Honest, introspective, yet rarely revelatory, the anthology often mistakes the comprehensive for the essential, and while it succeeds in explaining Willie Nelson to its audience, that’s about all it does.
For fans of the Red Headed Stranger, that might be enough, but anyone looking to explore Willie’s place in the intersection of country music, pop culture, and the sociopolitical fabric of 20th America might be disappointed. Continue reading ‘Willie Nelson & Family’ Review: Docuseries Mistakes The Comprehensive For the Essential In Well-Meaning Slog [Sundance] at The Playlist.
.Kate Bush’s resurgent post-Stranger Things career just keeps running up new hills: The British singer-songwriter is among the 14 2023 nominees for induction in the The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The avant-garde video artist Nam June Paik gets his own adulatory portrait in Amanda Kim’s documentary “Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV.” An act of biographical recovery that also, somehow, flattens a controversial artist, Kim’s film provides just enough contextual information to maintain interest, even if it’s never as radical as its titular subject. READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Films At The Sundance Film Festival Moving succinctly from birth to death, Kim provides a broad overview of Paik’s history and aesthetic interests.
In writer/director A.V. Rockwell’s feature directorial debut, “A Thousand and One,” Inez (a deeply felt Teyana Talyor) has returned to Harlem after spending a year in Rikers Prison.
This is “a place of mountains and myths,” we’re told as a montage of Central Appalachian imagery fills the frame. The mists, buffalo, ferns, and flowing waters intercut with the coal-filled mountains and mining towns that grew up around them.
There is no shortage of stories about fathers and their kids, specifically sons. But in Justin Chon’s (“Gook,” “Ms.
“Scrapper” starts in a dreary English flat with a child all alone but not incapable. That seems to be the M.O.
Few writers have as much of a hold on adults’ childhood selves as Judy Blume. Even if you’ve never read her books, her impact, especially with her most influential novels decades ago, is felt in how YA fiction is laid out today.
After growing up on a steady diet of “Law & Order: SVU,” Dianey Bermeo wanted to be like Olivia Benson, helping victims of sex crimes by bringing their assailants to justice. She gave up on that dream after police investigators in her college town failed to find the man who she said impersonated an officer and sexually assaulted her.
Roger Ebert once wrote, “just because something is not done anymore doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing,” when describing Norman Jewison’s irrepressible romantic comedy “Only You.” This same sentiment can be applied to Angus MacLachlan’s latest family dramedy, “A Little Prayer,” a welcome throwback to adult-oriented movie fare of yore like “On Golden Pond,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” or “Passion Fish.
The "Thoroughbreds" and "Bad Education" filmmaker's sci-fi/comedy finds him working on a larger canvas, but to lesser effect.
Brendon (Algee Smith) isn’t a bad kid. An aspiring artist living in Los Angeles, in his last month of high school, the pressures of his daily life, however, are beginning to overwhelm him.
Ira Sachs prefers relationships of the doomed variety — tempestuous passions torn asunder, sometimes by external forces like capitalism, which complicated the search for a home through New York’s cutthroat real estate market in “Love Is Strange” and “Little Men.” His latest film — the sexy, frustrating, loose-yet-compact, altogether irresistible three-hander “Passages” — also concerns property contracts and a homeless protagonist. However, this one’s got nobody but himself to blame for that predicament, fluent as he is in the same toxic strain of amour fou that previously perfumed the air in “Keep the Lights On” and especially Sachs’ debut, “The Delta.” As in that film — also pitched at the admirably humble quotidian scale Sachs hasn’t felt the need to exceed in more than a quarter decade — “Passages” follows a bisexual chaos agent so wrapped up in his own narcissism that he can’t see where his self-exploration ends and insensitivity to those around him begins.
Like most teenagers, Heather (non-binary actor Bobbi Salvör Menuez), a social misfit who lives in a rural town in northern Canada, has a strict midnight curfew to adhere to. But unlike other teenagers, staying out for longer has a much more dangerous effect on her.
Ria Khan (Priya Kansara, sparkling in her feature debut) likes to believe that she’s no ordinary British-Pakistani teenager. Her dreams, for instance, always seem outsized — she doesn’t just want to learn martial arts but rather perfect it so well that she can become a world-class professional stunt woman.
There was a time when it seemed like every movie trailer for every single comedy began with bouncy music and a voice-over artist explaining cheerfully, “[NAME OF PROTAGONIST] had it all!” But at the beginning of Nicole Holofcener’s “You Hurt My Feelings,” Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) does, in fact, seem to have it all: she’s in a long-lasting marriage with a successful therapist, they have a great apartment on the Upper West Side, their 23-year-old son Eliot (Owen Teague) is writing his first play, she teaches writing at the New School, and she’s just finished her second book.
If Jordan Firstman did not exist, it would be necessary for Sebastián Silva to invent him. “Discomfort rooted in class friction” and “the perverse amusement of watching people be annoying” rank high on the list of stalwart indie filmmaker Silva’s favorite recurring themes, and no modern type marries the two quite as handily as the social media influencer that plague of shamelessly promotional non-celebrities who adopt the entitled mindset of fame long before breaking into the industry sector accommodating it.
The "Once" and "Sing Street" filmmaker is back with another testimonial to the transformative power of popular music.
From Jesus’s ripped physique to the Song of Solomon, there’s something about Christian iconography that’s just a little bit sexy. And if you haven’t noticed that yet, you certainly will after seeing “Mamacruz,” the second film from Venezuelan writer-director Patricia Ortega (“Yo, Imposible”).
There’s a popular song in North Korea called “Nothing to Envy.” Lines include, “Who can ever break our strength? / We are not afraid of any storm or stress” and “Our home is the bosom of the Party / We are all brothers and sisters / We envy nothing in the world.” Though they lack running water, indoor plumbing, and basic freedom of thought — to name just a few things — North Koreans are taught to believe that they genuinely have it better than any other country on earth.