Reviews
Maybe It’s a Bad Thing That The Book of Boba Fett’s Fifth Episode Was So Good
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett, “Chapter 5: Return of the Mandalorian.”] This week’s episode of The Book of Boba Fett delivered a hell of a twist: It wasn’t about Boba Fett. Instead, the Mandalorian spinoff went ahead and became an episode of The Mandalorian, bringing back everyone’s favorite Space Dad (Pedro Pascal) and catching us up with what he’s been up to since surrendering sweet young Baby Yoda Grogu to Luke Skywalker for Jedi training. “Chapter 5: Return of the Mandalorian” did eventually connect to the events of Boba Fett so far, but it served more value in reintroducing a character who perhaps we didn’t realize we missed so much. The system shock of Din’s return ended up highlighting what’s been missing from the series: An actual emotion...
Eddie Vedder Takes a Look Inside on the Compelling Earthling
“Are you ready for a bit of Echo Victor?” a reverberating Eddie Vedder announces at the top of his third solo album Earthling, invoking the radio alphabet code for “EV.” And all at once, it’s clear this is the Pearl Jam frontman’s 13-song transmission from beyond our world, our time, our lives, and our dimension. He is calling out into the universe with his own Voyager Golden Record to share what it is to be human here on our planet. Or is it nakedly in a dreamlike alternate timeline where the ‘90s are in the future, and everything all is a warm, analog avocado-and-harvest-gold rave-up visited by legends like Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Ringo Starr, and touched by love and loss equally? This is Major Tom beyond ground control, the man who fell from Earth. In the capsule out in the cosmic oc...
Damon Albarn Addresses Taylor Swift Comments at Career-Spanning Intimate L.A. Show
Say this much for Damon Albarn, the guy’s got a sense of humor. As he was winding down his 17-song, 75-minute set at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, he addressed the elephant in the room: his much-discussed comments about Taylor Swift. In case you missed it somehow, Albarn caused quite the stir by knocking Swift’s songwriting that lit social media on fire Monday following Swift’s harsh rebuke. Many of her friends and collaborators came to her defense, leading Albarn to swiftly issue an apology. The day will mostly be remembered for that Before closing with “Song 2,” Albarn addressed the firestorm he created. Joking that “before he cast me into the social media abyss,” Albarn said that Los Angeles Times‘ Mikael Wood asked him if he’d play “Song 2.” That he did, after saying tha...
Sundance Review: Meet Me in the Bathroom Is a Time Capsule of 2000s Indie Rock
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Pitched between the doomsday-prepping of Y2K and the existential horror of 9/11, 2000s New York was also home to another seismic change in American culture: the burgeoning indie-rock scene, where dingy clubs on the Lower East Side played home to acts like Interpol, The Strokes, The Moldy Peaches, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. That’s the hazy, deafening, beer-sticky stage on which Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace (who previously directed the LCD Soundsystem doc Shut Up and Play the Hits) operate for Meet Me in the Bathroom, less an adaptation of Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral history of the same name than a living companion piece. Related Video Comprised almost entirely of archival footage stitched together b...
Sundance Review: jeen-yuhs Paints a Humanizing Portrait of Kanye West’s Beginnings
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Before his marriage to (and subsequent divorce from) Kim Kardashian, before his abortive 2020 presidential campaign, before the wild tweets and outrageous behavior that would define his public persona in the 2020s, there was just Kanye West and the music. From the beginning, the Atlanta-born, Chicago-raised producer turned rapper knew he was going to be one of the greatest musicians of all time; his first album, 2004’s The College Dropout, is studded with lines to that effect (“I was born to be different”). But it took the world a while to catch up with his ambition, and the problems didn’t stop there even after he finally broke through. By his side for the last twenty years was Clarence “Coodie” S...
Sundance Review: Director Amy Poehler Gets to the Heart of Two Entertainment Pioneers with Lucy and Desi
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: I Love Lucy is so inextricably tied to pop culture that many of its trademarks are still recognizable today, over seventy years since the show first aired. The central duo, brought to life by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, has been an object of fascination for almost as long — look at Aaron Sorkin‘s current project, Being the Ricardos, which has the edge in flashiness thanks to the star power of Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. Director Amy Poehler‘s thoughtful documentary on the subject has one extremely important thing Sorkin’s series lacks, though — access to the real thing. Thanks to a treasure trove of audio tapes and home movies shared by the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Lucie Arnaz, Luc...
Sundance Review: Ramin Bahrani Tests the Conscience of the American Id in 2nd Chance
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: America is a land of mythmaking: if you’re savvy and lucky (and often, unscrupulous) enough, you can carve out a legend of your own design. That’s what happened to Richard Davis, the oddball inventor of the bulletproof vest, who spun a tall tale about self-defense in a Michigan alleyway into a million-dollar company selling protective body armor to America’s police and military forces. A blustering showman with no small sense of spectacle, Davis hawked his wares with, as one flyer declares in bold letters, “SEX & VIOLENCE”: amateur films that featured everything from comedy skits to bikini-clad women to schlocky fictional shootouts that make Samurai Cop look like Dirty Harry. Oh, and he shot hi...
Sundance Review: You Won’t Be Alone is Staggering, Contemplative Folk Horror
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: In 19th-century Macedonia, a young girl is born to a woman in a remote mountain village. But mere days after her birth, the mother is approached by Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca), a mysterious, ancient witch — covered in flame-scarred skin — who lives outside the village and takes the blood of first-born children. Fearing for her child’s life, the mother takes her to a remote mountain cavern free from the witch’s influence, keeping her there for sixteen years without any other human contact. Eventually, the witch comes for her anyway, and soon the girl is transformed into a witch-creature like her, living under yet another stifling parental environment. Before long, she’s left to wander the Macedonia...
Sundance Review: We Need to Talk About Cosby Unravels the Man and the Monster
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: For fifty years, Bill Cosby was America’s Dad, a trailblazer for Black culture on film and television, and comedy. I Spy, The Electric Company, The Cosby Show: All pioneering examples of Black excellence and a guiding light to generations of Black people who yearned to see themselves depicted on screen with grace and intelligence. And then, we learned about the man under those comfy sweaters: someone with credible accusations of sexual assault and rape of dozens of women. For standup comedian W. Kamau Bell, and many Black people across America who’d grown up revering Cosby, those accusations were a tough pill to swallow. What do you do when a man whom you’d idolized, someone who carries seismic importan...
Sundance Review: Karen Gillan Faces Herself in Riley Stearns’ Deadpan Dual
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Sarah (Karen Gillan) is dying of a rare, incurable disease. It’s no big shakes, though, because up to now she hasn’t really lived: she has a strained, distant relationship with her boyfriend (Beulah Koale), her mother is disapproving, and she can’t even be bothered to cry when she receives her prognosis. Still, she unthinkingly accepts an offer to go through the process of “replacement”: growing a clone of her that will learn the ins and outs of her life, then take over when she dies. But ten months of watching her double (also Gillan, obviously) insinuate herself into her life, Sarah learns that she’s making a full recovery. But she’s got two problems: a) her boyfriend and family like the double more t...
Sundance Review: 892 Turns Real-Life Tragedy Into Mawkish Melodrama
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: On July 17, 2017, former Marine lance corporal Brian Brown-Easley (John Boyega) walked into a Wells Fargo bank branch in the Atlanta suburbs, with a grey sweatshirt and backpack, and handed the teller a simple note with four words: I have a bomb. Soon, he’s taken hostages, with police negotiators and a confused media scrambling to defuse the situation. His demands? A measly $892 in disability funds denied to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Those are the circumstances reconstructed in Abi Damaris Corbin’s 892, a well-intentioned and occasionally striking thriller that charts the heartbreaking moments of a desperate man’s last gasps at visibility and relevance. Related Video Attica! T...
Sundance Review: In Jesse Eisenberg’s When You Finish Saving the World, Everyone Loses
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: What happens when tensions between an equally oblivious mother and son (Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard, respectively) finally boil over? In Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut, the answer is, unfortunately, sort of nothing. There’s something to be said for slice-of-life films like this one, adapted from Eisenberg’s 2020 audio drama of the same name and co-produced by Emma Stone and husband Dave McCary. The film raises plenty of interesting questions, particularly around the ideas of altruism, actual moral goodness in a world perpetually concerned with what looks good, and the tried and true theme of generational divide. The simmering story only runs 88 minutes (a dream!), but, throughout that runtime, When...
