by Joseph Houlihan

Mo’ Better Blues, the 1990 film by Spike Lee, still crackles with an enduring intensity. Set in a world of black Brooklyn at the beginning of the 1990’s, the film follows Denzel Washington, a working jazz trumpeter, as he approaches maturity. Wesley Snipes plays Washington’s foil as a Saxophone arbiter of New Jack sensibility against Post-bop traditionalism. Spike Lee plays a friend, and his sister Joie Lee plays against Cynda Williams as the women who would love Washington.
 
Coming after She’s Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze (1988), and the sensational hit Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo’ Better Blues captures the ferment of the Fort Greene Brooklyn creative elite at its fever pitch.

by Frank Olson

​American B-movies have a long and distinguished history of smuggling subversive sociopolitical commentary into crowd-pleasingly tawdry scenarios. Eagle-eyed viewers can get an extra level of enjoyment out of certain cult classics by, for example, following the homoerotic subtext of The Bride of Frankenstein or taking note of the various ways that Night of the Living Dead reflects the turmoil of its time. They Live upends the usual priorities of the politically-minded midnight movie. Rather than hiding its criticisms of ‘80s social values, the film’s plot literally revolves around exposing the subtextual messages that reinforce the prevailing ideologies of our culture. 

by Matt Levine

​Continuing the tradition of sublime ridiculousness established by sketch-comedy classics such as The State and Mr. Show, Key & Peele provided some of the best comedy on television from 2012 to 2015. Even when the show’s ideas fell flat (an inevitability for any show that whips up so much content from week to week), it was enlivened by the presence of its stars and creators: tall, lanky, often-manic Keegan-Michael Key, who can be laugh-out-loud funny simply with the tone of his voice; and droll, stocky Jordan Peele, a master of straight-faced absurdity. Whether the show was embracing its love for the truly ludicrous, tackling controversial subjects, or lampooning elements of black culture, the duo’s chemistry and willingness to embrace any half-baked idea was ingratiating at worst and euphoric at best.

by Michael Montag

It’s with some reservation that I call Out of the Past a textbook film noir. All of the signature noir iconography is in the picture, of course: a virulent femme fatale, a terse detective, complex narrative structure, poetic voice-over narration, an overwhelming sense of doom, expressive photography, doppelgangers, and so on. But it's only in retrospect that we identify all of these motifs as being indicative of a “noir” style. What’s most fascinating about Out of the Past is its darkening mood and tone. By 1947, the fate of noir detectives had grown increasingly grim. In pictures like The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946), the characterization is, as always, in the hard-boiled, anti-heroic tradition, but the noir hero is mostly in control in these films. The Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes prevail. As the years passed, however, the noir hero became more unhinged and self-aware. Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past is one of the pictures that helped pave the way for the crazed, heated-up noirs to follow in the coming years. One notable exception is Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), which could contend with any noir picture for being the darkest and most sardonic.

by Matt Levine

If you’re wondering why Asghar Farhadi’s acclaimed third feature, Fireworks Wednesday, hasn’t gotten an American release until now—ten years after its original release in Iran—the answer is unsurprising, if depressingly familiar: money. In 2006, Asghar Farhadi was a less recognized name to international movie lovers than Jafar Panahi, whose Offside was released the same year. So while Fireworks Wednesday’s original American release was limited to the festival circuit, its belated distribution ten years later—after A Separation (2011) and The Past (2013) have cemented Farhadi as one of modern cinema’s great humanist filmmakers—amends that mistake, proving why Farhadi deserves to be mentioned alongside his compatriots Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami (though his style, tone, and subjects often differ markedly from them).

by Nick Mangigian

​There are a lot of things going right with A Hologram for the King, Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of Dave Eggers’ novel of the same name, in terms of its story moves, its sweetness, and its constant desire to surprise us. So why did it leave me feeling a little cold? The film is strong when it reckons with the challenges and hauntings of a life lived, but a little glib in moving its protagonist beyond all those troubles. At 90 minutes, the film feels long where it should be short, and short where it should be long. 

by Matt Levine

by Peter Schilling Jr.

For whatever reason, 2016 is seeing a glut of musician bio-pics: Hank Williams Sr., Chet Baker, Nina Simone, and Miles Davis are all getting the Hollywood treatment. Thinking back on this genre, it occurred to me that you could count the number of great movies about musicians on one hand, and that hand would have to be without fingers or clenched in a fist (though I am a sucker for Amadeus.) It makes you wonder: what do filmmakers think of when they seek to make a film about the life of a popular singer, other than dollars? Obviously, there’s an admiration of a great talent, which begs the question as to why so many of these movies seem so bereft of skill, much less imagination. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d imagine it’s the same desire that prompts people to want to make movies from books—if a musician’s life is a great story, why, by all means, transform it into a great movie.

by Daniel Getahun

by Matt Levine

Anthology films are a tough undertaking, often prone to a measure of unevenness and redundancy; maybe no other narrative structure is more difficult to sustain. This is true of The High Sun, a Croat-Serbian-Slovenian co-production with three parts linked by the theme of love during wartime. The same two actors, Tihana Lazovic and Goran Markovic, appear as starcrossed romantic protagonists in three different time periods a decade apart—1991, 2001, and 2011. Each story has something to do with deep-seated hatred between Serbs and Croats endangering love, and if each tale too often succumbs to predictable clichés—from snickering, gun-toting soldiers to hunky handymen to drug trips conveyed via blurry lenses and weird camera angles—they’re also enlivened by heated performances and some beautiful widescreen cinematography (by Marko Brdar).