Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 19 July 2024. Beachwood Sparks pioneered the indie-country genre, pushing Americana into experimental territories with their fusion of twangy country vibes and psychedelic sounds. Their unique niche in the indie music landscape is marked by ethereal melodies and introspective…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 12 July 2024. Composer Helen Leach, known for her enchanting compositions that evoke rich landscapes and deep emotions, releases her album titled Diary of the Bee. This new collection features a series of rich, tonally traditional compositions. With all…
The Moon landing is a cultural touchstone in the US, so much so that it’s the topic of several big-name movies including Hidden Figures and First Man. Almost as pervasive as the event itself is the myth that someone (in some tellings, Stanley Kubrick) shot the whole thing on a sound stage. Now the two…
Yorgos Lanthimos can be polarising. Even among his own fan-base, his films can be divisive. Recently, something of a split has emerged between fans of his “old stuff” (like Dogtooth and The Lobster) and those of his “new stuff” (The Favourite and Poor Things). I’m a bit on the fence here, because I’m certainly a…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 5 July 2024. Featuring the triple j playlisted and Rolling Stone praised “Sunday Drive”, Eves Karydas steadies to embark on a new trail, burning all the tapes and moving on. Written across Stockholm and Meanjin / Brisbane, recorded in…
The artistic links between France and Japan run (perhaps surprisingly) deep. The French Impressionists were obsessed with Japanese woodblock prints, for example. In the 1950s, while French filmmakers and audiences embraced Japanese cinema, with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Gate of Hell (1954) featured at the Cannes Film Festival; while Alain Resnais’ seminal…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 28 June 2024. The Felice Brothers first emerged from the Hudson Valley nearly two decades ago with a gloriously ramshackle sound that drew on everything from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan to Walt Whitman and Flannery O’Connor. In just…
For a while now, Glen Powell has largely traded on his (very) good looks. His recent cinema outing Anyone But You, proved a box office hit. But the actor spreads his wings somewhat as an undercover agent in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. I say “somewhat” because he still can’t entirely escape his genetic gifts in…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 21 June 2024. Lake Street Dive have pushed the possibilities of pop music as a unifying force, not only through their eclectic sound—a boldly original cross-pollination of soul, folk, jazz, classic pop, and more—the five-piece’s all-embracing ethos has also…
A divertimento is a light piece of music, written just to amuse. But it’s a slightly incongruous title for Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar’s portrait of the conductor and composer Zahia Ziouani, because the film tackles some pretty heavy themes. To use a current term, this is an “origin story”; telling how a teenage Ziouani went from the…
