It’s extremely hard not to gush over Jeff Buckley. An Adonis with an four-octave range, the singer-songwriter had the sensitivity of an early-Seventies folkie, the melody-meets-muscle rock chops of an early-Nineties grunge practitioner, and a frontman sex appeal that was timeless. He counted Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Led Zeppelin, and …
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The man staring into the camera is not Pee-wee Herman. He may look a little like him, kinda sorta sound like him, have that same sly, agent-of-chaos-reporting-for-duty-sir smirk. But he is not the man in the tight gray flannel suit, the one who went from cult-figure famous to beloved by …
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The song titles alone evoke a sense of joy, excitement, community: “Dance to the Music,” “Stand!”, “Everyday People,” “Sing a Simple Song,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” “Everybody Is a Star.” (That last one was also the …
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You know the Tolstoy quote about all happy families being the same, but “every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way?” The quartet at the center of Steven Soderbergh‘s ghost story Presence has refined their own particular brand of dysfunction to perfection. The mom, Rebecca (Lucy Liu), is a …
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If any backstage pop institution deserves a biopic of his or her own, it would be Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ tragic manager, champion, and supporter through rough and giddy times alike. Epstein has been portrayed here and there in films, but Midas Man (available on streaming services starting today) is …
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Established via a coup in 1964, the Fifth Brazilian Republic had been in place for close to seven years when government officials showed up at the house of Rubens Paiva. He had been a former Congressman who’d been vocal about the regime change back in the day, but Paiva was …
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How much do you love Saturday Night Live? Can you rattle off your personal Top 10 favorite sketches at a moment’s notice? Have you torched friendships while debating who is the most overrated and underrated cast members of all time? (We’re not touching that first one, but the correct answer …
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Inside every man lies a beast, waiting to be unleashed — that’s the central conceit behind most werewolf movies, be they horrifying (The Howling), sexy (the Twilight movies), or occasionally, both (the Jack Nicholson/Michelle Pfeiffer potboiler Wolf). Sometimes this full-moon fever is seen as liberating. Other times it’s a painful …
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There’s an entire subgenre of modern crime movies you might call “Heat Rashes” — those heist thrillers that worship at the altar of Michael Mann’s 1995 stone-cold classic. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the best and most admiring of these Mann-handlers is, by a huge margin, 2018’s …
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“There is only brutality here.” This is a line from a letter that a U.S. Army captain, played by Lucas Neff, writes to his loved ones back home, midway through the new Netflix miniseries American Primeval. It’s an unfortunately apt statement, albeit not a surprising one if you know that …
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