I’m not sure if the universe could have cooked up a more fitting album for our current situation than Jeremy Zucker’s solo debut, love is not dying (2020). Throughout the 40-minute release, Zucker employs his unique brand of intricately assembled melancholic pop to explore themes of loneliness, emotional isolation, and resolve in the face of…
The National Gallery of Art’s online exhibit Fashioning a Nation is a memorial to the close relationship between two essential facets of culture: history and fashion. Each sketch connects the present to a literal and figurative thread of the past. Every artist joins to construct carefully a world of exquisitely tailored styles that proliferated during…
Back in July of 2019 the first trailer for The Hunt (2020) dropped online, showing a group of rich, snobby (liberal) elites hunting a bunch of regular (conservative) people, and the internet lost all common sense. The trailer was for a blatantly satirical movie, taking aim at arrogant coastal city-dwellers who didn’t see their midwestern…
In the music video for “Blinding Lights,” The Weeknd, born Abel Tesfaye, dances maniacally through the empty nighttime streets of Las Vegas. Bandaged and bloodied, he sports a red suit reminiscent of the Joker, laughing deeply at nothing and nobody in particular. The unsettling video serves as an introduction to the dark themes throughout After…
Content warning: This article references sexual assault and suicide. On the wall of the Renwick Gallery there is “Sunshine on a Cannibal.” Rectangular canvases placed closely together create a jarring visual of distorted culture. In this piece, Andrea Carlson reexamines the definition of “exotic,” creating one image from the art of various civilizations. In this…
When I first listened to Dua Lipa’s self-titled debut album, its opening lyrics made me swoon. Lipa starts the song “Genesis” with, “In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth / For what it’s worth, I think that he might’ve created you first.” Throughout every endearing pop song on Dua Lipa (2017), the singer conveyed…
First Cow opens with a huge, rusty barge floating down the Columbia River at a glacial pace. Between the vessel’s entrance from the left of the screen and eventual exit to the right, the audience settles into the slowness of First Cow, becoming absorbed into its hypnotizing, soothing atmosphere. At the same time, the scene…
Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson follows Malcolm Kershaw, co-owner of a mystery bookshop in Boston known as Old Devils Bookstore. The story opens with a fictional disclaimer framing the book as a true story, as Malcolm talks directly to the reader, leading them through recent events. From the beginning, the reader gets the feeling…
“Peter means something different to every person. We all have an idea of what that story means and who he is. And it has so much to do with how we think of what freedom is. Peter is a symbol of freedom,” director Benh Zeitlin said about adapting the classic J.M. Barrie tale, Peter Pan,…
Pixar’s new fantasy adventure flick Onward (2020) is surprisingly poignant. “It’s probably the most personal film we’ve ever made at Pixar,” Kelsey Mann, the studio’s Head of Story, said in an interview with the Voice. He should know: Mann led the storyboarding team and coordinated with director Dan Scanlon at every point of the filmmaking…