CREED III. With his directorial debut, Michael B. Jordan has made the subtly momentous decision to render this (presumably last) chapter in the Rocky saga as a statement: This is decidedly not a Rocky movie. Sure, Balboa’s shadow flits at the edges of things, he being the somewhat unwitting progenitor of the whole works. And, […]
The Miniplex
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Magic Mike’s Last Dance Ponies Up
MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE. It’s been a long, unexpected journey, for our hard-hustling, unworldly and undulating hero Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) and for all of us. We’ve been together for more than a decade now, tiling a roof in a Tampa swelter, swilling GHB while Richie fluffs, falling in and out of love and touring […]
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Almost Sweet/Scary Enough
SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW. Yeah, I’ll watch a romantic comedy. As much as I may long for the unobtainable approval of the critical studies elite — simultaneously reveling in violent cinematic catharsis, celebrating genre trash and semi-privately thinking I really should watch more Akerman and Bergman — I’m a product of my environment. And […]
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Music Tonight: Monday, Feb. 13
Weird electronic show alert. Hudson Glover, aka Huddy Glo, is an artist who I have reviewed here before, and one whose music is dense, danceable and complex, full of Bill Evans-styled block chords and minimal disco beats. A true auteur in an emerging world of old and new sounds. Chini has also graced these pages […]
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You People Brings the Cringe
YOU PEOPLE. There is a cathartic release that comes with watching terrifying movies. The adrenaline, the comforting resolution, the jump scare at the end that allows us to laugh at ourselves a little. Even the lingering dread as you turn the bathroom light on later to brush your teeth is a small, morbid thrill if […]
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Tripped Out
INFINITY POOL. Because Antiviral (2012) slipped past me — and, it seems, most of us — I became aware of Brandon Cronenberg on the release of his second feature Possessor (2020), which I still (shamefully) have not seen. Despite the suboptimal timing of that movie’s debut, it helped make the writer-director’s name (beyond its substantial […]
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Aftersun is All Grown Up
AFTERSUN. “Coming of age,” outmoded notion though it may be, continues to be an object of fascination, in art as in life. In order to contextualize transition and ostensible maturation, we continue to construct and promulgate myths, demarcate arbitrary boundaries and assign significance to moments of arrival. As time marches on, though, we (the species) […]
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Risk and Reward in The Whale
THE WHALE. It is an easy, reductive, even dismissive temptation to qualify Darren Aronofsky’s work as “difficult” or “challenging.” Ambitious? Polarizing? Indubitably. But in referring to it as challenging, or academic, people generally seem to mean they don’t like it, or that it makes them think about things they’d rather not. (The irony of my […]
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Music Tonight: Tuesday, Jan. 17
Back from the dead like a risen phoenix after the lethargic paralysis of COVID, the Miniplex is once more hosting Latin Dance Night with DJ Pachanguero. I can tell you that my foggiest memories from the pre-plague times are pleasantly colored by this event, and if you want to partake and make some new memories […]
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Music Tonight: Friday, Jan. 13
Sons Of is a mini-indie supergroup, featuring Sam Prekop of The Sea and Cake (and also the ne phew of my dear late friend Jack Turner) and John McEntire from Tortoise. Both groups were groundbreaking in the ’90s and early aughts, due in no small part to the efforts of the aforementioned gentlemen. Come see […]
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Babylon Towers
BABYLON. As soon as we saw the trailer, my wife, who plays her cinephilia close to the vest most of the time, said, “I want to see that! It looks like a Coen brothers movie, doesn’t it?” When the time came to commit, though, she was less enthusiastic, (like most of the intended audience). This […]
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The Cutting Room Floor
THE FABELMANS. The elevator pitch would have us believe this is a movie about the magic of (watching and making) movies, a life dedicated to a calling and the simple conflict in a house divided by art versus pragmatism. It can be so defined, of course; Steven Spielberg does not generally go in for unkind […]