Playboi Carti ‘Music’ Review: Abstract and All-Encompassing
The album is long and messy, but it demonstrates the rapper’s staggering range.
Music Writing
FKA twigs ‘Eusexua’ Review: Body Music
The album presents an artist learning to find strength in near-constant movement.
Sophie ‘Sophie’ Review: An Uneven Approximation of a Pop Auteur’s Vision
The album feels like a diluted approximation of a true visionary’s unique brand of pop.
Concert Review: WHY?/Baths @ The Atlantis
WHY? and Baths are two acts united by their commitment to the bit.
Vampire Weekend ‘Only God Was Above Us’ Review: A Blast from the Past
This is a band magnetically pulled toward the sounds, images, and aesthetic that define them.
NLE Choppa ‘Cottonwood 2’ Review: An Eclectic but Bloated Effort
The album doesn’t quite justify its mammoth runtime, but the rapper has the good sense to try out a series of different stylistic conceits.
Boygenius ‘The Record’ Review: An Amorphous Musical Statement
The trio struggles to find a collective identity or creative method that complements their myriad talents.
Beyoncé ‘Renaissance’ Review: A Disco-Trap Trip
On her seventh album, the singer displaces us from both history and the present and situates us in her unique ecosystem.
Kendrick Lamar 'Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers' Review
The album is a gripping treatise on the relationship between Lamar's inner turmoil and the cultural landscape.
Animal Collective ‘Time Skiffs’ Review: A Wistful, Quietly Reflective Album
Animal Collective’s Time Skiffs is the work of a band who are leaning into the nostalgic observations that come with age.
Japanese Breakfast ‘Jubilee’ Review: The Album Embraces Life with Exuberance
The album conceives of the exuberant possibilities of life and love.
Review: Arca’s Kick I Is a Kinetic Celebration of Self-Actualization
Pop music, it seems, has finally caught up with Arca, née Alejandra Ghersi. The Venezuelan artist has helped shape the sound of hip-hop, indie-pop, and R&B over the last decade, making sizable contributions to projects by Kanye West, Björk, and Kelela, while toiling away at her solo work in a separate, more challenging lane. After three albums of apocalyptic, ambient tone poems, Arca’s pop and avant-garde interests converge on Kick I. It’s an anti-pop pop album, a distillation of the producer-si
Film Writing
'Nosferatu' (2024) Review
Where has the imagination gone that once gleefully animated the films of Robert Eggers?
'Goodrich' Review: A Warmly Humanist Family Comedy
Goodrich’s modest ambitions yield modest rewards.
'Love Lies Bleeding' Review
Perhaps sometimes simply believing in the possibility of liberation from physical state and circumstance is enough.
Criminally Overrated: 'Almost Famous'
Like its protagonist, Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical recounting of his days as a 1970s kid music journalist is confused.
'The Invisible Fight' Review: A Delirious Black Metal Kung Fu Comedy
Writer-director Rainer Sarnet’s deliriously weird film would be irksome if it weren’t crafted so lovingly and with a charming earnestness.
'Maestro' Review
A capable biography of a queer artist, the woman who loved him and the music that moved them both.
'A Still Small Voice' Review: The Existential Cost of Spiritual Care
The film does a fine job of holding a mirror to the experience of therapeutic practice.
'Barbie' Review
Greta Gerwig renders a feature-length toy commercial about as cheeky, subversive and interrogative as it can be.
'Infinity Pool' Review
It’s never as cryptic and only intermittently as disturbing as we would like it to be.
'Ticket to Paradise' Review
Roberts and Clooney struggle to spark any tangible magnetism, either together or apart.