Steve Erickson

Film Review: “Shayda” — Memories of a Courageous Mother

March 13, 2024
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Noora Niasari’s personal involvement elevates “Shayda” above melodramatic Lifetime fare: this is a compellingly warm tribute to the Iranian director’s mother.

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Rock Album Review: Kim Gordon’s “The Collective” — Ensnared in Anxieties

March 8, 2024
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The album’s layers of thick and swampy sound make Kim Gordon’s anxious point.

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Film Review: “How to Have Sex” — The Holiday Trap

February 9, 2024
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“How to Have Sex” doesn’t criticize teenage girls for wanting to get laid, but it points out how the cultural environment in which they do so is directed entirely towards male pleasure

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Rock Album Review: Sonic Youth’s “Walls Have Ears” — Intimations of Sounds to Come

February 9, 2024
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Sonic Youth’s fans remain passionate enough to justify the release of a slew of live albums.

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Book Review: “Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras” — Celebrating Blaxploitation Cinema

January 26, 2024
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“Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras” celebrates Blaxploitation as a positive as well as a necessary turning point in American cinema.

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Album Review: Lou Reed’s “Hudson River Wind Meditations” — Meditative Loop-De-Loops

January 10, 2024
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It may not be one of ambient music’s masterworks, but this 2007 album deserved far better treatment than utter neglect from Lou Reed fans.

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Film Review: “Concrete Utopia” — No Room at the Top

December 13, 2023
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“Concrete Utopia” echoes “Parasite”’s sharp critique of class exploitation, but it applies a faster pace and more restless energy to its vision of economic meltdown.

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Book Review: “Normporn” — Yearning for the Impossible Middle

November 7, 2023
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The cultural critic’s wrestling with the compromises that the pleasures of mass culture inevitably demand is heartfelt. In a word, it’s normal.

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Film Review: “Fair Play” — All’s Fowl in Love and Business

September 25, 2023
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The unpleasantness of the film’s first sex scene turns out to be a foreshadowing of a refreshingly curdled vision of insecurity in the 21st century.

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Film Review: “The Mother and the Whore” — Not By Words Alone

September 1, 2023
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“The Mother and the Whore” is a film about failure: its characters are pushed towards misery not only by their own flaws, but by the failure of the ‘60s to deliver a promised revolution.

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