The Complicatist Pt 2: Galesburg, Revisited
Holding aloft a flickering torch for John Darnielle’s older stuff
Arts
In The Temple of Paul Rudd
Niceness can be a career option…
Lawyers Don’t Surf
Point Break : Is there any point to a reboot of one of the greatest action movies of the 1990s?
The Complicatist : London O’Connor, and others…
Songs of innocence, regret, anxiety, failure and punishing ennui…
The Complicatist : Loving the Songs of the Vulgar Boatmen
Good lyric writing can be a thing of wonder
War At Ground Level
Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory is still the greatest World War I film.
Free Films, On Youtube
Make your own film festival, from movies available free online.
The Complicatist : Sufjan Stevens
The Carrie and Lowell album is about trying to survive your family’s impact on you
Finding Love in Hell
How does David Lynch’s Wild at Heart look, 25 years later?
The Complicatist : Willie Nelson
Looking back at 50 years of Nashville’s black sheep boy
The Year In Film
It felt like a remarkably good year for cinema. And that was without getting Godard in 3D.
Katniss Joins The News Team
In Mockingjay Part One, everyone’s working for the media
The Complicatist : Arthur Russell
A tribute to the recently re-discovered innovator
Gone Girl : The Trouble With Amy
In Gone Girl, David Fincher’s cold perfectionism makes black humour out of tabloid shocks- and may even complete a media-age revenge trilogy
The Complicatist : Bob Dylan himself, and by others
Some Dylan obscurities and cover versions to mark the release of the expanded Basement Tapes…
The Year of Scarlett
An alien Scarlett Johansson gets under your skin.
Classics : Tales from Moominvalley ( 1962) by Tove Jansson
The Moomins, and their gift of tolerance
From The Lost Continent
Youth, art and radical politics in the Olivier Assayas film After May
The Complicatist : Blue Eyed & Soulful
From the Righteous Brothers to Yelawolf and beyond…
Watch The Seas
Gareth Edwards reboots Godzilla – the monster that’s all metaphor.
Heathers, At 25
Teen moviedom’s greatest black comedy, a quarter of a century later
The Complicatist : Three Feet High & Rising
Celebrating 25 years of hip hop’s best-loved album
Out Of The Past
In films like A Separation and The Past, Asghar Farhadi has become Iran’s most celebrated cultural export. There’s a price.
The Complicatist : Jackson C. Frank, Mark Kozelek
The love songs of the middle-aged mope
Lonely, In Love
Why Spike Jonze’s Her could be the most romantic film of the year.
The Complicatist : Angel Olsen, William Tyler
Are you lonely too? Hi Five! So am I!
The Ten Best Films Of 2013
The year the movies got small, and the small screen got big
The Complicatist : Laneway, 2014
Likely highlights from the best on offer at Silo Park
In The Autumn of the Woodsman
Is Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen’s so-called “return to form” really as good as they say?
The Unbeatable Lightness of Gravity
Sandra Bullock and the space/light dimension…