Browsing: NP Approved

NP Approved Bang Bert Berns Story
9.4
0

Bert Berns, a major figure in the early 1960s American pop and R&B recording scene, was certainly unsung, but it would be a stretch to call him a hero. A musical childhood lead to a fascination with Latin and Cuban music, which in turn lead him to co-write the classic “Twist and Shout,” sung first by The Top Notes and produced by a…

NP Approved a quiet passion
9.0
0

Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion, a bright and engaging portrait of Emily Dickinson, is more family drama than biopic. Steadfastly anti-romantic, the film exaggerates the conventions of the standard biopic, dishing out expository lines of dialogue without any attempt to make them sound conversational. It’s not just that the…

NP Approved shot
9.2
0

“I keep thinking that something went very wrong,” chuckles Mick Rock, the British photographer, at yet another major showing of his iconic work. “We were supposed to be rebels and outsiders.” But the rebels of the past are destined to become mainstream, and Rock was no exception, as we learn in Shot! The…

NP Approved t2 trainspotting
9.0
0

It’s hard to imagine anyone outside of Danny Boyle, Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, or Robert Carlyle who wanted, let alone demanded, a sequel to the 1996 adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s blackly comic, transgressive, subversive satire, Trainspotting, but here we are 21 years later with T2 Trainspotting, a near…

NP Approved Personal Shopper
9.0
0

Like any good French filmmaker, writer-director Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours, Demonlover, Irma Vep) has crafted both an offscreen persona as a hyper-intellectual filmmaker and openly courted, if not controversy, then audience disengagement and alienation. Under one interpretation, a true auteur and mainstream filmmaking…

SXSW 2017 Small_Crimes
9.5
0

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau stars as Joe, a former cop heading back home after spending six years in jail for attempted murder. Once home, he immediately finds himself wrapped up in the mess he caused, only this time he has lost his hold on everything he once held dear…

NP Approved logan
9.0
1

All art is political, even superhero art. And there’s little doubt that Logan, the second collaboration between writer-director James Mangold (The Wolverine, 3:10 to Yuma, Night & Day, Cop Land) and star Hugh Jackman, qualifies as art, as superhero art, and as political art. Set in a possible future for the X-Men universe – both a…

NP Approved i am not your negro
9.3
0

“You’ve been beaten, and it’s been deliberate,” said author James Baldwin in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review, describing the desperation of living in America. “The whole society has decided to make you nothing. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.” Five years earlier in 1979, Baldwin…

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