Critical Review

Critical Review

The best queer stories acknowledge pleasure’s colorful origins, unflattering or otherwise

Each vignette is a high-wire act, teetering along the razor’s edge separating shame and desire, passion and violence, actualization and obliteration.

Offill delivers news of the coming doom in clear, piquant prose, arranged as glimmering diaristic fragments

Weather takes an atmospheric view of dread, from domestic to existential, that is particular to our 21st-century life.

Director/writer Eliza Hittman's new film Never Rarely Sometimes Always 

Never Rarely Sometimes Always is something of a procedural, except the procedure here isn’t a police investigation or anything along those lines, it’s an abortion.

Director Louie Schwartzberg, who has made a name for himself over the past few decades because of his ravishing time-lapse photography, has likely found the ideal subject to suit his schtick in Fantastic Fungi, a movie about the inarguable special-ness of mushrooms

Fantastic Fungi is also a portrait of a community of mushroom obsessives—who journalist Eugenia Bone beautifully describes as, “bloated pleasure-seekers with a scientific bent.”

Bacurau, streaming via the Parkway, will make you wanna start the revolution—if only you could leave your house

The town of Bacurau fights back, they do some damage, and it feels like a victory for its characters and for viewers, a blueprint for imminent direct action and self-defense.

If a good performance is one that resonates, then Collective Dreaming at MICA’s BBOX theater March 6 and 7, was spectacular, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made the performance unexpectedly relevant and poignant.

If a good performance is one that resonates, then Collective Dreaming at MICA’s BBOX theater March 6 and 7, was spectacular.

On Marnie Ellen Hertzler's Crestone which you can’t watch anywhere right now

Baltimore filmmaker Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s Crestone feels like a great piece of outré journalism. It found the sweet spot of making you feel as though you’re there watching something happen and commenting on it all only when necessary.

Six Artists Achieve an Intricate Buzz in 'Surfacing' at MONO Practice

What if the observation, repetition, and cultivation of pleasure found in ornamentation were central to human existence?

A less cloying way for “mainstream” movies to ponder #MeToo, an encouraging trend in Hollywood movies

There is something in this collection for everyone—the personal, the political, the intimate, the strange, and humorous

In Flourish, Malech's poems rarely alight anywhere near where they begin—often introducing unexpected themes into the fray.

A sleepy spy movie that turns into a slow-burn romance and then a tragic catharsis

What looks like a staid costume drama is more like if Chantal Ackerman got ahold of a Merchant-Ivory movie.

Designs for Different Futures, the special exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, considers a range of changes to come

What choices do we have now and what future will we end up with? 

Hyper-local Ghost Story Explores History's Tensions with the Present

Who are these people? What is their relationship? Why is it so damn awkward? It's an engaging hook for the audience that fits nicely with the farcical Clue-inspired supernatural whodunnit that follows in the second half of the one-act play. 

Lola Pierson's opera, with music by Horse Lords, finds humor in incomprehension

Lola Pierson, who wrote the text and directed the show, frequently had the audience laughing—often at the very confusion that opera (and language) might perpetuate.

Martin's mixed media works present the strength of spiritual ancestors and place questions about beauty and race into daily consciousness

Walking through Delita Martin's solo exhibition, Calling Down The Spirits, felt like I was flipping through my grandmother’s photo albums, seeing intimate details of people that I could never know: a turn of the neck, an upward cast of an eye.

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