Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors – Blue, White, and Red – are grand reminders of the little motions that gather slowly but surely, to deliver the quick, sudden turns that give even the most indolent life meaning.
Robert Cray plays subtly with basic blues convention on Midnight Stroll, turning it into a brand-new face for listeners who have heard it all before.
Bruno Barreto’s romantic charmer Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is rich with sensuous detail that fills every scene with dizzying amounts of culture, music, and atmosphere.
Denzel Washington’s voiceover in neo-noir Devil in a Blue Dress is an equal mix of deadpan charm and wide-eyed innocence, which textures and nuances his performance.
The retro-electro feel of Vanessa Daou’s 1998 ‘Plutonium Glow’ is influenced by ‘90s rave culture, which pushes Daou’s usual bedroom listeners onto the dance floor.
It was not without admirable aplomb that Times Square attempted to capture the punk movement in its zeitgeist the way Saturday Night Fever did with disco.
Glitch-hop pioneer Thavius Beck talks about Public Enemy, the Bomb Squad, and LEO, an album heavy with his baritone boom and pumping, catawampus beats.
Three-piece UK band Goya Dress specialized in stylishly baroque Sturm und Drang rock; dizzying Märchens sated with the drama of a Francisco Goya painting.
Gordon Parks’ classic blaxploitation film Shaft presents Richard Roundtree as a swaggering, controversial action hero in gritty, early ’70s New York.
Bestriding boundaries between hip-hop, poetry, and surrealism, poet-musician Malik Ameer Crumpler forges a strange and compelling work that is utterly and uniquely his own.
San Francisco’s new wave band Romeo Void exists in a curious interstice between the social context of the early ‘80s while being wholly prescient of our era of #MeToo.
While murder and crime certainly run deep in Claude Chabrol’s world of subterfuge, the dark desires of human nature that provoke them run immeasurably deeper.
