Brock Heasley’s The Shift is a remarkably incoherent farrago of sci-fi tropes and Christian proselytizing.
Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky
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Review: Rustin
George C. Wolfe’s Rustin leans firmly toward optimism. That’s understandable; this is the first film centering Bayard Rustin, a key civil rights organizer whose influence on the movement has been downplayed in part because of his homosexuality.
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Review: Fingernails
The film is successful because it manages to create its own logical, nonsensical rules, which love then snaps.
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Valerie June makes everything sound like old-time folk
Singer and guitarist Valerie June takes a broad-church approach to roots music. She incorporates elements of old-time, country, electric blues, rock, R&B, and neosoul into her vision of a single seamless American tradition. A big part of June’s secret is her distinctive voice, simultaneously nasal, rough, and dreamy, which recalls iconic singers such as Sara […]
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Genesis Owusu makes ugly, beautiful funk for freedom
Popular music has plenty of upbeat anthems that celebrate the performer’s beauty and success—think Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” or Olivia Rodrigo’s “All-American Bitch.” It also has lots of downbeat paeans to the performer’s pitifulness, a la Beck’s “Loser” or Radiohead’s “Creep.” Much less common are enthusiastic, danceable tracks that boast of the singer’s ugliness and smallness, which […]
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Review: The Creator
Gareth Edwards’s The Creator is a movie about AI that is hammered, welded, and spackled together from a whole lot of other better and more coherent films.
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Review: Sex Education (Season four)
There aren’t a lot of television shows that make the world a better place by existing. Sex Education is one.
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The Reader’s guide to World Music Festival Chicago 2023
In July, I attended a community meeting at the Broadway Armory in Edgewater about the city’s plan to turn the Park District facility into a temporary shelter for asylum seekers. A group of protesters, angry that much of the armory’s programming would be relocated or otherwise disrupted, carried bright yellow signs reading “Don’t Displace Us.” […]
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Review: El Conde
Power and money will scoop out your soul, and fascism is very hard to kill. The real Pinochet died in 2006, but those particular truths, unfortunately, live on.
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The Body unleashes unpredictably predictable doom
The Body’s music is a remorseless, seemingly eternal trudge of numbing night that frequently contorts itself into a bizarre festering eclecticism, then returns to its fetid, featureless form. Formed in Providence, Rhode Island, the duo of drummer and programmer Lee Buford and guitarist and screamer Chip King (who also supplies electronic weirdness) have proved ominously […]
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Review: Blue Beetle
There is a recent idiosyncratic, smart superhero movie about family and togetherness. It’s called Encanto. I’d suggest watching it and skipping Blue Beetle entirely.
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Australian four-piece Psycroptic drown you in epic blackened death metal
The core of Australian four-piece Psycroptic is two prolific Australian brothers, drummer Dave Haley and guitarist Joe Haley, and they’ve been bashing out clotted tendrils of technical death metal with their main project for nearly a quarter century. The band’s early self-released albums are defined by charismatic vocalist Matthew “Chalky” Chalk, who alternated between bloody […]
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Review: Talk to Me
Talk to Me is a by-the-numbers genre horror exercise which could as easily have found a home at Blumhouse. It’s elevated, though, by its attention to building sympathetic characters and by its remarkably ruthless willingness to tear those same characters apart.
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Review: The Out-Laws
The Out-Laws just wants you to like it. And by the end, I, at least, found myself doing just that.
Posted inMusic
Disinter will not stop the death
Disinter have been spewing forth evil blackened death metal for more than three decades. The Chicago longtimers have changed their lineup many times since their 1997 debut full-length, Desecrated (Pulverizer)—only guitarists Mike “Bats” Martocci and Mike LeGros have survived from that era to the present. But their sound has maintained an unholy consistency, with fierce […]