Reviews
Rosalía’s MOTOMAMI Is a Hell of a Bilingual, Multi-Genre Ride
In late 2018, Rosalía captivated audiences with El Mal Querer, her breakthrough album where she gave flamenco music a modern pop twist. Since then, the Spanish singer-songwriter has performed around the world and expanded her sonic palette. In her follow-up, MOTOMAMI, she changes lanes and subverts her pop and flamenco roots with global sounds like reggaeton and bolero, all while reflecting on her newfound fame. Those who wanted another full flamenco affair like El Mal Querer might be disappointed, but MOTOMAMI is an exciting detour where Rosalía flexes her seemingly limitless artistry across 16 tracks. MOTAMAMI is split between an aggressive MOTO side and a vulnerable MAMI side. Rosalía rips into the album with the scorching “Saoko” — in which she interpolates “Saoco” by Puerto Rican regg...
SXSW Review: Richard Linklater Goes to the Moon, But Keeps Things Grounded in Apollo 10 1/2
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: Anyone and everyone who was alive in the summer of 1969 likely knows where they were when they saw the first men landing on the moon on their television screens. But for young Stan (Milo Coy), his experience was a li’l different. Turns out, months before the iconic trip, the suburban Houstonite was approached by a couple of NASA suits for a once-in-a-lifetime mission. You see, due to an engineering blunder, they’d built the lunar module juuust a bit too small for an adult astronaut. So they needed a kid. And Stan, of course, is the perfect candidate. Related Video This didn’t happen, of course; it’s the stuff of childhood reverie, and adult Stan (Jack Black), who narrates, establishes early that he was a “fabuli...
SXSW Review: Under the Influence Interrogates the Addictive Escalation of David Dobrik
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: Out of the great, grand entertainment experiment that is YouTube, David Dobrik is easily one of the platform’s greatest successes. Leveraging his devil-may-care attitude and penchant for increasingly ambitious or invasive stunts, Dobrik quickly became a multi-millionaire on a level most non-movie stars would never enjoy, with six-figure sponsorship deals, 18 million subscribers, and a cadre of fellow sex-and-booze-loving daredevils (colloquially known as the Vlog Squad) whose boats his rising tide would also lift. But the same sensationalism that fueled Dobrik’s success would also be his downfall (inasmuch as one of the richest kids on YouTube, with a cultish zoomer following, can fall). In 2021, he suffere...
SXSW Review: Tony Hawk Keeps His Distance in Skate Doc Until the Wheels Fall Off
The Pitch: The secret to Tony Hawk’s success is his willingness to fail. When we first see him in the opening minutes of Sam Jones’ doc Until the Wheels Fall Off, we see exactly why: The skateboarding titan, still the face of the sport even in his fifties, tries and tries again to pull a 900 — the borderline-impossible skate trick he miraculously pulled off at the 1999 X Games — only to eat shit on each attempt. His body slams into the wood with concussive force every time, occasionally hurting enough to make him scream in pain. And yet, he gets up and tries again. What fuels someone like Hawk to keep sacrificing his body for the chance at a twice-in-a-lifetime flip? Over the course of two hours, Jones interrogates this question, charting Hawk’s youth as a child skating prodigy, his d...
SXSW Review: Halo Feels Like A Reskinned Version of Sci-Fi Shows Past
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: In the mid-26th century, a sprawling human empire comes under attack from the mysterious Covenant, an alliance of alien races dedicated to a fanatical religion surrounding a race of ancient extraterrestrials and the artifacts they leave behind. To combat them (and, not coincidentally, the rough-and-tumble insurrectionists who resist humanity’s militaristic government, the UNSC), Dr. Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone) has created the Spartans — armored supersoldiers trained and tortured from birth to be the ultimate, emotionless killing machine. The biggest and most badass of them all is John-117, aka the Master Chief (Orange Is the New Black‘s Pablo Schreiber), who can dispatch a Covenant Elite and a colo...
Fly Anakin Carves His Own Lane on Frank
Emerging as one of 11 members of a hip-hop collective in his native Richmond, Virginia, collaboration has always been central to rapper-producer Fly Anakin’s work. Now, with the release of his solo debut album, he showcases the talents that brought the spotlight on him and his local scene. Like Danny Brown’s Bruiser Brigade, Mutant Academy is a scrappy, underground outfit that takes its name from an X-Men video game. Both groups are also intensely local, and committed to nurturing a unique sound for their city. The collective battles for success in a state that, despite claiming legendary hitmakers like Timbaland, Pusha T, Missy Elliot, and Pharrell Williams, has remained generally overlooked as a bed of talent between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta. A producer-heavy unit, Mutant Academy has...
SXSW Review: X Is Ti West’s Raucous TeXXXas Chain Saw Massacre By Way of Shyamalan’s Old
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: X has a lot on its mind, and the line between exploitation and empowerment is just one of many rich themes mined by Ti West in his first feature film since the 2016 John Travolta and Ethan Hawke-starring Western In A Valley of Violence. “So the camera changes things,” Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) says midway through the film, just before RJ, Lorraine’s boyfriend and the young starry-eyed director of the porno at the center of the film, storms out of the shoot, furious and uncomfortable with her sudden interest in appearing on-screen in their dirty picture. Lorraine, quiet as a church mouse, is the innocent boom mic operator, not like these other girls willing to debase themselves on-camera, or at least that’s how RJ ...
SXSW Review: Dolly Parton Doc Still Working 9 to 5 Chokes on Its Own Ambition
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: More than 40 years ago, 9 to 5 burst onto movie screens with a deceptively winning formula for 1980: Take three women at the top of their game — actress/producer/activist Jane Fonda, top-tier comedienne Lily Tomlin, and country music superstar Dolly Parton — and throw them together in the dreary workplaces of Carter-era America with a chauvinistic boss (Dabney Coleman) you’d just love to see tied up and tortured. It may have played like a lark, thanks in no small part to a whip-smart script from Patricia Resnick (3 Women) and fanciful direction from Colin Higgins (Harold and Maude), but it had feminist teeth underneath the laughs, which led it to box-office success and decades of appreciation. Decades ...
SXSW Review: DMZ Creates a Compelling New World, But Only Feels Like the Beginning of the Story
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: The timing of DMZ is maybe not the greatest, depending on whether or not you’re up for engaging with a story about urban warfare at a time when that sort of literal real-life horror is headline news. But the new HBO Max original series, based on the DC comics series and executive produced by Ava DuVernay, still stands out for its compelling premise and dynamic cast, despite a few issues largely stemming from its format. New World Order: When we first meet Alma Ortega (Rosario Dawson) in the not-too-distant future, she’s working as a medic in an intake facility for those who have tried illegally to enter the United States of America — not to be confused with the Free States of America, because seven years ago, a ...
SXSW Review: WeCrashed Is Too Long, But Nails the Daffy Rhythms of the WeWork Scandal
The Pitch: How far can a startup run on vibes alone? Turns out, it’s however far $47 billion gets you, at least in the smoke-and-mirrors valuations of VC culture. After all, that’s the magic number WeWork CEO Adam Neumann (Jared Leto) and his kooky wife/chief branding officer Rebekah Neumann (nee Paltrow; yes, she’s Gwyneth’s cousin, played by Anne Hathaway) used to fool Wall Street for nearly a decade into thinking they were the next great world-changing startup. But within a year’s time, WeWork’s value plummeted, the Neumanns left in disgrace — though not without a $2 billion golden parachute — and the buzziest company in America became a punchline. What led to such a precipitous fall? That’s the question WeCrashed, Apple TV+’s latest push for the startup-grifter boom (after Netflix...
SXSW Review: Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville Is an Introspective Drama Uninterested in Excuses
The Pitch: Series co-creators Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus keep the true-crime story wave going with The Girl From Plainville, an eight-part limited series based on the “texting suicide case.” In 2014, Conrad Roy III died by suicide in Mattapoisett, Massachussets — this tragedy eventually garnered national attention as investigators learned of the role that the teen’s girlfriend, Michelle Carter, played in his death. Roy’s and Carter’s motivations were previously explored in Erin Lee Carr’s 2019 documentary, I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter – and, of course, in all the preceding media coverage of the groundbreaking case. But The Girl From Plainville uses artistic license to venture deeper into the minds of these adolescents, and track how a chance meeting in Flor...
Greta Van Fleet Kick Off 2022 Tour in Michigan: Recap + Setlist
Greta Van Fleet opened their “Dreams in Gold” tour in Kalamazoo on Thursday (March 10th), kicking off the run in their homeland of Michigan with the first of five dates in the state. With support from the Rival Sons and Velveteers, Greta Van Fleet left the Wings Event Center with a distinct taste of rock and a night to remember. First, The Velveteers took to the stage, opening with “Motel #27.” The Colorado trio, led by singer Demi Demitro, set the mood for an energetic evening; Demitro thrashed appropriately as she sang about a hazy and uneasy world of loving. Next was Long Beach, California’s Rival Sons, who also held their own in a competition of which opener could wow fans the quickest. For those unfamiliar with the five-piece, they are old enough to have a few grays, and cool enough t...
