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.
Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky
Posted inFilm
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.
Posted inMusic
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.” […]
Posted inFilm
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.
Posted inMusic
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 […]
Posted inFilm
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.
Posted inMusic
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 […]
Posted inFilm
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.
Posted inFilm
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 […]
Posted inFilm
Review: Maggie Moore(s)
The problem is that the decent Coen brothers knock-off and the better-than-decent rom-com don’t really work together.
Posted inFilm
See beyond disability in The Unseen
Inspiration and overcoming are the Hollywood disability default. Jennifer Goodman, RJ Mitte, and their collaborators suggest that there’s a lot more to see.
Posted inFilm
Review: Extraction II
I guess the one upside is that it’s hard to imagine that the inevitable Extraction 3 will be much worse.
Posted inMusic
Singer-songwriter Aaron Lee Tasjan loves all the genres
Aaron Lee Tasjan’s 2021 album was called Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan! (New West). The title captures the singer-songwriter’s exuberance and hints at his eclecticism—his records pack in so many different styles that listening to one can feel like you’re shuffling between three. Based in East Nashville, he’s perhaps most associated with roots music, per his “East […]
Posted inMusic
Chicago alt-country darlings the Texas Rubies come on home
The Texas Rubies are the great Chicago alt-country phenomenon that wasn’t. Lead vocalist Jane Baxter Miller and guitarist and harmony singer Kelly Kessler were Kentucky transplants who met in Chicago in the early 90s and started writing hard-hitting retro-country songs in the tradition of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. They released one album, Working Girl […]