During the past few years, Kamasi Washington has found himself in places a jazz musician never would have expected to be. With the release of his aptly named 2015 triple LP, The Epic, the L.A. saxophonist and bandleader was deemed the genre’s next big thing. So there he was, in …
Read More »'Shangri-La' Review: The Art of Zen Record Producing According to Rick Rubin
“It’s not about me at all,” says Rick Rubin — renowned record producer, hip-hop pioneer, possessor of one of the world’s truly magnificent celebrity beards — at the very beginning of Shangri-La, Showtime’s four-part docuseries that premieres tonight and is … well, ostensibly about him. He’s talking to the project’s …
Read More »Watch Satanists Praise Gov. Rick Scott in Clip from New Doc 'Hail, Satan?'
Despite its admittedly provocative title, the documentary Hail, Satan? is not an endorsement of devil worship. It is, however, a funny, nuanced, sympathetic look at the people behind the Satanic Temple, an organization that may have originally started out as trolling, but has evolved into a grassroots movement advocating for …
Read More »'Apollo 11' Review: Immersive Doc on Moon Landing Is a Masterpiece
It is easy to think that there’s nothing left to be said, and even less to be seen, about the flight that took place on July 16th, 1969 — one that took three men hundreds of thousands of miles away from earth and let two of them step foot on …
Read More »10 Best Movies of Sundance 2019
We came, we saw, we occasionally got altitude sickness and we watched a shitload of movies — this is what we do every January when we head out to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival, that annual mixer of hopeful first-time filmmakers, indie-cinema veterans, boundary-tweaking visual artists, industry …
Read More »10 Best TV Shows to Watch in June: 'Cloak and Dagger,' 'Pose' and More
Remember when summer used to be the dead zone for TV programming? Ha! Now it’s the time when a young upstart like Paramount Network (R.I.P., Spike TV) can drop two swing-for-the-fences shows – one set in the modern Wild West, the other in swingin’ Seventies SoCal – featuring glossy production …
Read More »10 Things We Learned From 'Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars' Doc
Lili Fini Zanuck’s documentary Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars follows the guitarist as he pursues a single-minded mission to raise the profile of the blues in popular culture. During the Sixties, he moved through bands at a reckless pace in search for the right combination of blues aficionados – …
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