Dimension 20: Fantasy High Junior Year Around episode four or five of Dimension 20’s third season of Fantasy High (aptly dubbed Junior Year), I thought to myself giddily, “If they keep this up, this will be their best season ever.” This meaning the intensity (and amount) of character pressure on each of the Bad Kids, […]
Category: Monthly Recs
We missed the month of April in our monthly recommendations, so here’s a quick post to catch-up on everything we might have recommended. Plus some early May knockouts. Plus a cultural shift or two. Cowboy Carter – Beyoncé Cowboy Carter dropped at the tail end of March, and it would’ve been my rec for April […]
your name. (2016) written and directed by Makoto Shinkai your name. begins in media res, meaning when Mitsuha attends school one day, we experience her confusion alongside her: her friends and family report that she acted strange the day before, though she has no memory why. It’s only when she fully body swaps with Taki, […]
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin Perhaps no other author has painted a whole portrait of a young man as James Baldwin has in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Baldwin begins and ends the story with John Grimes, the stepson of a violently abusive Baptist preacher, on the day of his […]
Anatomy of a Fall dir. Justine Triet The first half of Anatomy of a Fall, the recent film from French writer and director Justine Triet, tells you many times over what it will not do. When the central character (and suspect) Sandra tells her lawyer Vincent that she is innocent, he says (if a little […]
“Change” by Big Thief I listened to the album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You by Big Thief for the first time earlier this month and its first track, “Change,” just hit the hardest for me. Adrianne Lenker’s voice is beautiful–lingering and haunting–as she contemplates what change looks like at different levels and […]
The Devil’s Plan, Netflix My favorite game show ever–and what I believe to be the best reality TV show ever made–is The Genius, a South Korean show that aired for four seasons in 2013-2015. The Devil’s Plan, a 2023 Netflix show, was created by the same showrunner and acts as the unofficial sequel and inheritor […]
Speed (1994) dir. Jan de Bont I cannot talk about Speed without talking about Los Angeles. On screen LA is represented frequently but not accurately—it is often the site of the apocalyptic, the superficial and fake, or it acts as a synecdoche for the Hollywood industry. I am not a stickler for realism in my […]
Without consulting each other, our authors watched a different Wong Kar-wai film and then chose it as their recommendations. What can we say? We were in that romantic August mood. In the Mood for Love (2000) written & directed by Wong Kar-wai This movie has been on a to-watch list for a while, and it […]
EVERGREEN by PVRIS It’s hard to determine which PVRIS single is the best forerunner to their new album EVERGREEN. Was it “Monster,” which uses similar distorted guitars and vocals? Was it “My Way,” the lyrics and title of which make clear the manner frontwoman Lynn Gunn has chosen for her sound: “My my my way […]
