Best Albums of 2018

2018 was a deceptively great year for music. There wasn’t a runaway favorite for Best Album of the Year like there was last year, when Kendrick Lamar’s DAMNstole the spotlight and never gave it up. But in that vacuum, it allowed a bunch of new and/or underappreciated artists to fill the void. And people really stepped up their game. This year was filled with great mus...
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Micro Review – Hereditary

Hereditary is a disturbing horror film with expertly crafted suspense. It’s uncomfortable to watch at times, and yet at others you can’t help but feel an immense sadness for these characters. For most of the movie, we’re more focused on the intense guilt and grief that this family is going through, which helps give it a bit more depth than is normally present in the genre....
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Live Review – Blockers

Blockers Live Review(Beginning 50 minutes in) These were my thoughts while watching Blockers. I just watched a string of very serious movies. I felt like I needed to watch a movie that I might not necessarily love, in an entirely different genre and style. To kind of recalibrate my movie-watching senses. Balance the critical scales, if you will. A comedy like Blocker...
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Review – Roma

I tend to think a lot about what I think about movies. Or of music, or TV, or books. I have this impulse to categorize my enjoyment of a piece of art. To compare it to other things I have seen, and rate and rank it alongside other similar pieces of art. This can often be very enjoyable. It forces me to evaluate what I find important. But sometimes there’s a problem with th...
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Review – Y Tu Mama También

There was this trend in a lot of indie movies from the early 2000’s, particularly international films. A narrator would break the action to describe very specific details about insignificant side characters. Short little synopses of their lives, their joys and their misfortunes. And then we never see or hear about that character again. It can feel unnecessary at first, bec...
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Review – Beautiful Boy

Addiction stories sometimes feel the same. There's often the same course of events, the same ups and downs. The same results. It doesn’t usually end well in real life. But we hear about some of the ones that do end well. Or do we? I think the problem with some movies about addiction is that we are often given a false sense of finality. We’re given the story - the hear...
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Micro Review – Minding the Gap

An inspiring and devastating documentary following a group of skater friends struggling to find a path from childhood to adulthood in a dying midwestern town. Devastating in the harsh realities these real life characters must confront about their difficult pasts. Inspiring in the sheer talent and vision of filmmaker Bing Liu, who has a remarkable ability to capture stories...
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Micro Review – Support the Girls

Regina Hall stands out in this low-fi workplace dramady. And there are good contributions from Haley Lu Richardson and Junglepussy too (yes, that's the name she goes by - her real name is Shayna McHale). It's a decent movie, funny at times, and it has an intriguing underlying commentary on gender roles and workplace politics. It's got something to say about a very American...
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Micro Review – Tully

I don't know if I've seen a movie that so accurately captures the insanity of parenthood like Tully does. I found myself laughing at non-funny moments in this film, purely because of the realism (and ridiculousness) of it all. Charlize Theron and Mackenzie Davis are both great. If I wasn't a parent, I'd probably think they overdid things a bit. It's pretty harrowing at tim...
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Micro Review – Searching

I didn't expect Searching to be as emotionally resonant as it turned out to be. To be honest, it seemed like it would be a shallow, corny genre thriller that relied heavily on a unique storytelling device (the entire film happens on screens). But the characters are surprisingly well developed. And the plot, while sometimes a bit far-fetched, is still frighteningl...
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