Movie Review Archives - Stereogum

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Is Clumsy And Obvious, But It Gets The Job Done

Tom Breihan — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 17:51:05 +0000

About halfway through Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, writer/director Scott Cooper's noisy new Bruce Springsteen biopic, I got restless. My seat was uncomfortable. I was hungry. I could see just about every music-biopic cliché coming, and I knew I'd have to get through all of them before I could stretch my legs and find an open burrito spot. But then the picture arrived at the scene where Jeremy Allen White's Bruce Springsteen records "Born In The USA" with the full E Street Band behind him. The film had already shown Springsteen recording that song as a moody acoustic demo. But when those drum-hits and that triumphant keyboard riff came in, the song was transformed, and so was the theater. I forgot all about cramped seats and burritos, and I was transfixed.

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We Reviewed Anthony Kiedis’ New Cold Brew

Scott Lapatine — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:14:33 +0000

Last month Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis and Survivor: Panama contestant Shane Powers announced a "concert-friendly" canned coffee brand called Jolene. It's been a minute since Stereogum reviewed any unexpected artist product so today we are launching a new video series for that purpose.

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Pavements Is A Fittingly Weird Reflection On An Even Weirder Legacy

Abby Jones — Mon, 05 May 2025 18:46:12 +0000

There’s a moment about halfway through Alex Ross Perry’s new Pavement movie Pavements where Joe Keery realizes he may have made a career-hindering mistake: He can’t stop talking like Stephen Malkmus. Poor Keery, a 33-year-old onetime Netflix darling from Massachusetts, can’t help but blur his syllables together in an aloof California drawl, a heavy vocal fry emanating through static lips. "I don’t really think I want to be Stephen anymore," he suddenly tells his dialect coach, who’s still befuddled by the photo of Malkmus' tongue that Keery presented to her. For research purposes.

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Dig! XX Is For The Heads

Arielle Gordon — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:15:11 +0000

Let’s face it: You just don’t see celebrities railing line after fat line of cocaine off of mirrored tables anymore. In 2025, the mere implication of hard drugs — even by a party girl avatar like Charli XCX — prompts hand wringing online. Every star, now, is also a de facto role model for some sanitized ideal. But in 1996, when the documentarian Ondi Timoner embarked on her seven-year journey tracking a handful of bands in the West Coast rock scene for the film that would become Dig!, there was no Twitter or Deuxmoi or Oh No They Didn’t! or Perez Hilton keeping score of every suspicious sniffle or strung out diatribe.

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The Amy Winehouse Biopic Back To Black Simplifies And Misrepresents Her Story

Christian Kriticos — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 17:05:21 +0000

In the face of tragedy, it is a human impulse to find someone to blame. So, the Amy Winehouse story needs a villain.

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The Meet Me In The Bathroom Movie Omits Too Much, But What’s In There Is Mesmerizing

Chris DeVille — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 17:26:42 +0000

Where do you stand on the myth that the New York rock revolution vanquished nu-metal and pop-punk? How do you feel about the fact that the Strokes sparked a raucous new wave of bands in the city that, in turn, inspired a media frenzy? How important to your coming of age were Is This It and Fever To Tell and "House Of Jealous Lovers" and "Losing My Edge"? Where on the spectrum between insufferable self-indulgence and page-turning intrigue would you place Meet Me In The Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman's 2017 oral history of that New York scene?

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The Dinosaur Jr. Doc Freakscene Captures A Legendary Rock Band’s Sound And Fury

Chris DeVille — Fri, 27 May 2022 20:05:22 +0000

"I don't know where people get this idea that it's supposed to be fun or something to play music," J Mascis says in his signature hyper-relaxed drawl, near the beginning of the new documentary Freakscene: The Story Of Dinosaur Jr. "That seems to hinder a lot of people: 'Well it's not fun, why should I do it?' That never occurred to us that it's supposed to be fun. It's just, music was really important and we wanted to do it."

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Peter Jackson’s Mammoth Beatles Documentary Is A Feast For Fans

Chris DeVille — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 11:01:28 +0000

There is already a movie about the Beatles making Let It Be. It is called Let It Be. Throughout January 1969, a crew led by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg -- who had helmed the Beatles' music videos for "Paperback Writer," "Rain," "Hey Jude," and "Revolution" among other work at the center of 1960s rock -- filmed the Fab Four rehearsing, recording, and ultimately giving their final public performance on the roof of their Apple Corps. headquarters in London. The Let It Be movie famously depicts a band in its death throes, racing against the clock to resolve their internal tensions, learn an album's worth of new material, and plan and execute a live TV special that was ultimately aborted. Despite ending on a triumphant note with that rooftop concert, Lindsay-Hogg's movie is essentially a funeral for a group that had descended into cross-purposes, bruised egos, and bickering. It was received as such upon its premiere in May 1970, just a month after the Beatles announced their breakup to the world. But the Beatles have never been fond of the movie, and as Keith Phipps noted out in a look back at Let It Be this week, it has been out of print since the early '80s.

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Todd Haynes’ Velvet Underground Documentary Is A Vivid Portrait Of A Transformative Band

Vanessa Ague — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 14:05:21 +0000

When the Velvet Underground performed around New York in the 1960s, they weren't the most popular band. "They had this off-putting aura, you know? Yikes, they were scary," says Martha Morrison, guitarist Sterling Morrison's wife, as she remembers one of their concerts at Cafe Bizarre for Todd Haynes' new documentary, The Velvet Underground. Then, actress Mary Woronov’s jaw drops as she remembers the night that they came to Andy Warhol's Factory in all black attire and performed "Heroin" early on in their career. The screen flashes from a stop motion concert footage montage to a dimly lit basement, marked by mannequin legs hanging from a thread and the silhouette of a curvy vintage couch. The laid-back opening strums of "Heroin" hum underneath images of gyrating hips and audience members. Gradually, one panel becomes two and the images become more and more distorted, all in-time with the music's increasing pace and increasingly uncertain lyrics.

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St. Vincent & Carrie Brownstein Attempt To Satirize Pop-Star Documentaries In The Nowhere Inn

Dani Blum — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 15:14:43 +0000

We're in the midst of a pop-star documentary boom. The past few years have brought an onslaught of films promising authentic glimpses into the lives of glittering pop figures: the bracing Billie Eilish documentary The World's A Little Blurry, Taylor Swift's carefully orchestrated Miss Americana, Beyoncé's "Beychella" concert film Homecoming, even the Jonas Brothers jumping into the fray with Chasing Happiness. These movies give musicians -- and their management -- the chance to control their narratives; in return, fans get parceled-out morsels of intimacy. It's a contract between artist and viewer, a bargain we make again and again and again.

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Questlove’s Sundance-Anointed Summer Of Soul Is As Great As You’d Hope

Phil Freeman — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 20:20:43 +0000

The Harlem Cultural Festival was a series of six free outdoor concerts held in New York's Mount Morris Park between June 29 and August 24, 1969. Given that these dates overlapped with the Woodstock festival in upstate New York (Aug. 15-18), the Harlem Cultural Festival has sometimes been described as "Black Woodstock," but the new documentary Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) -- the directorial debut from Roots bandleader Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, which won this year's Grand Jury Prize at Sundance -- shows that it was much more than that.

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Netflix’s Notorious B.I.G. Documentary Scales Back The Myth-Making Just Enough To Show Us The Man

Brian Josephs — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 21:00:33 +0000

One of the first things that comes to mind when you connect Jodeci and the Notorious B.I.G. is very loud sex. While "Feenin" plays in the background on the "Fuck Me" interlude, Lil' Kim calls Biggie a “gangsta killin'," "chronic smokin'," "blendin' black greasy motherfucker." At Ready To Die's dead center, the descriptors are pretty much a vulgar SparkNotes of Biggie’s persona: rotund, strapped, great on the mic and in bed (and two songs later, a pretty good motivational speaker).

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SOUL, Pixar’s Metaphysical Jazz Movie With A Score By Nine Inch Nails

Chris DeVille — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 17:00:03 +0000

Even a decade into his life as an acclaimed Hollywood composer, just one Tony shy of an EGOT, it's still wild that Trent Reznor did the music for a Disney movie. Almost as bizarre: It's a movie centered on jazz, a genre Reznor's music has traditionally not touched. But Pixar's SOUL is a film that travels beyond the boundaries of our perceived reality, and within its story, Reznor and his longtime composing partner/primary Nine Inch Nails collaborator Atticus Ross make some kind of sense.

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Beyoncé’s Black Is King Celebrates The Black Diaspora By Reinventing The Lion King

Britt Julious — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 13:55:16 +0000

Imagine what you think of blackness. Then reimagine it, again and again, until it is true, until it is righteous, until it is real. That is Beyoncé’s new goal.

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Rock Critic Coming Of Age Movie How To Build A Girl Is Working From A Faulty Blueprint

Simran Hans — Thu, 07 May 2020 19:30:31 +0000

"Cool people are the worst!" says the pop star Björk, winking conspiratorially at 16-year-old Johanna Morrigan (Beanie Feldstein). Sure, she's a figment of Johanna’s imagination, speaking from a Debut-era tour poster hanging in a public restroom, but her middle finger to the mainstream sentiment remains earnest in Coky Giedroyc's How To Build A Girl, out this Friday on VOD. Co-written by and based on British columnist Caitlin Moran's bestselling 2014 novel of the same name, it is also based, at least partly, on her life. Both Moran and Johanna grew up working class, on a council estate in Wolverhampton surrounded by several dogs and siblings; both were hired as rock critics by male-dominated music magazines at the tender age of 16 (Moran for British weekly Melody Maker, Johanna the Disc & Music Echo).

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Trolls World Tour Is A Poptimist Nightmare

Larry Fitzmaurice — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 13:04:00 +0000

Before we take a dive into the rich text that is Trolls World Tour, a brief disclaimer: This is a movie for children. I feel the need to state this essential fact up front, since you are almost certainly reading this in quarantine (if you are not: get inside immediately), and quite possibly running out of things to watch -- or desperately in need of a light-ish distraction from the Criterion Channel queue that you'll never actually touch. Maybe you feel like tonight's the night to shell out $20 to watch some animated fare that might carry a level of entertainment value for adults, as myriad "kids' stuff" has done with varying levels of success over the past decade.

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Miss Americana Attempts To Reaffirm And Redefine Taylor Swift’s Good Girl Image. It Doesn’t Totally Fail.

Kristen Yoonsoo Kim — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 16:22:53 +0000

If you’re pressing play on the new Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana (out now on Netflix), with any hint of wariness, you’re not alone, and you're not too cynical. You're exhibiting a basic awareness of how the pop publicity machine works, and how biographical documentaries, especially those of living celebrities, are often emotionally manipulative. And this isn’t just any living celebrity; it’s Taylor Swift, who’s always seemed impenetrably PR-trained. Even her candidness has a way of feeling performative.

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The Most Savage Things Critics Are Saying About Cats

Scott Lapatine — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 18:57:28 +0000

Cats, the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical adaptation of the T.S. Eliot poetry collection, hits theaters tonight. It promises advances in "digital fur technology" and the trailer broke the internet because it was so disturbing. It is currently scoring a 14% at Rotten Tomatoes.

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Rocketman Is Over-The-Top & Surprisingly Tender

Larry Fitzmaurice — Thu, 30 May 2019 15:00:48 +0000

You have a right to be nervous about Rocketman. The Elton John biopic arrives at a time in which critical stock in rockstar biopics has never been lower. Of course, "critical" is the operative word here, as Bohemian Rhapsody -- last year's Oscar-winning Queen drama starring Rami Malek and partially directed by alleged sexual predator Bryan Singer -- has since become the highest-grossing musical biopic worldwide in history. Its $903.2 million take more than quadrupled the $201.6 million tally for previous record-holder Straight Outta Compton.

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The Dirt Is A Terrible Movie About Terrible People

Phil Freeman — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 14:16:11 +0000

It's hard to imagine a less of-the-cultural-moment movie than The Dirt, the story of Mötley Crüe's rise to fame and fortune. The 2001 book on which the film (out today on Netflix) is based, and about which its "as-told-to" guy Neil Strauss is contractually forbidden to speak, depicts the members of the group, in their own words, as disgusting criminals — predatory drug addicts, straight-up rapists, and abusers of everyone around them — who should have been shoveled into a trench sometime in 1986, before they could squirt out the 80% worthless Girls, Girls, Girls. (The first two songs are pretty good.) And even at the time, the book was a horror story. It's baffling that anyone thought this was a story that needed to be retold on film in 2019.

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Vox Lux And The Death Of Poptimism

James Rettig — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 17:01:53 +0000

(Warning: Vox Lux spoilers ahead.)

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A Star Is Born Tells A Familiar Story. That Doesn’t Make It Any Less Great.

Gabriela Tully Claymore — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 13:36:29 +0000

It must be incredible to walk the earth with Bradley Cooper’s confidence. The man decided that he was going to remake A Star Is Born, a film that has already been made four times (five if you count 1932's What Price Hollywood?, which inspired the 1937 original). Not only was Cooper going to co-write and direct this film, he was also going to take on one of the two leading roles. Oh, and in order to do that he had to learn how to play the guitar and the piano and how to sing like a decaying rock star. This was to be Cooper’s directorial debut, his great unveiling as an auteur, and instead of making some cute little indie he planned to go blockbuster big. In order to achieve his dream, Cooper had to go into a room of producers and pitch the idea. Miraculously, he walked out with their blessings and $38 million.

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We Are Your Friends: The Stereogum Review

Gabriela Tully Claymore — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 16:16:37 +0000

In 1963, American International Pictures released the first of the Beach Party movies, a series of films targeted toward teen audiences at a time when the concept of young adulthood was still half-rendered. Every one of them stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, and every one takes place on or near a sunny beach in Southern California or some other hip and idyllic location. The plot is always scaffolded as follows: a group of teens go to a beach-like destination and are instantly misunderstood by the surrounding adults who consider them delinquents and attempt to foil their vacationing fun. Surfing, drag racing, motorcycle gangs, skateboarding, whatever recreational activities were in vogue at the time, are on display, alongside the outfits and up-dos. Though the narrative arc never changes, the most original element of each film comes in the shape of its musical score and soundtrack. There is always a musical performance or two, a stray character made to imitate a pop-culture icon of the era. Stevie Wonder, Dick Dale, the surf rock band the Hondells, Nancy Sinatra, James Brown, Lesley Gore, and the Supremes all made appearances. They're unmistakable B-movies, bad objects made for a drive-thru theater that have ended up in the arsenal of film history because AIP managed to do one thing extraordinarily well: bottle up the passing fads of an era to be dug up and perused decades later. They also made a lot of money because they gave teenage audiences across the country a glimpse of the look and sound of cutting-edge coolness.

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Straight Outta Compton: The Stereogum Review

Collin Robinson — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 18:04:41 +0000

Straight Outta Compton, the new movie about N.W.A., once dubbed the world's most dangerous group, strives for (and achieves) historical accuracy, but rarely offers any new insight. The film is pistols and palm trees, colors and cops, all surrounding a larger-than-life group whose indelible songs regaled with every gritty detail. The biopic spans the years from the group's origin in 1986 to Dr. Dre's founding of Aftermath Records in 1996; it captures Compton of the era as if recreated by a time machine. But this depiction of N.W.A and the city they proudly hail from is like a classic painting -- worthy of and warranting discussion (especially with Sam DuBose as the latest entry on the list of Rodney Kings), even though the image of the group formed in the public's mind will not change. Casual fans of the group will most likely not learn anything new, while devotees will notice holes. That said, as a retelling, the film resists glamorizing and embellishing too much, which is laudable as N.W.A.'s story is as much the perfect "La-La Land" tale as it is not.

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DOPE: The Stereogum Review

Collin Robinson — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 16:21:54 +0000

Dope is a present-day black coming-of-age tale set in Inglewood, CA, but you could also consider it a millennial's updated version of 1999's The Wood. The two films have a few things in common: Both were directed by Rick Famuyiwa; both feature De'Aundre Bonds as Stacey, now as a reformed gang-banger and security guard at the high school attended by the film's protagonist, Malcolm; and both tell the story of the good kid in a mad city. Aside from those connections, Dope is, well, dope in its own right. It contains almost innumerable pop-culture references and intersections, racial implications, conversations about sexual orientation, political jabs, and more. These elements would be dizzying were it not for the delicately struck balance between lightheartedness and seriousness. The film doesn't leave much unaddressed, but won't leave you with lumps from being beaten over the head.

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Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck: The Stereogum Review

Chris DeVille — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 14:21:02 +0000

Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck is a movie about the frontman of Nirvana, but it isn't about Nirvana. The word Bleach is never uttered. Dave Grohl was not interviewed, and his entry into the band is not addressed; he's just there all of a sudden as the archival footage shifts into the Nevermind era. Even the band's incalculable impact on modern music and pop culture only comes up in regard to its impact on Cobain. We don't need a movie to tell us the story of Nirvana's rise from obscure Washington indie-rock kids to reluctant rock 'n' roll saviors who changed the music industry forever; that story has been told over and over again, and its facts are readily available at your public library. Thanks to a quarter-century of intense media scrutiny, we already know a lot about Cobain's private story too: his troubled childhood, his debilitating stomach problems, his self-medication with heroin, his fear and rejection of the worldwide media spotlight, his (um) unconventional family life with wife Courtney Love and their daughter Frances Bean Cobain, and his suicide by gunshot at age 27. It's history, legend, scripture. But we've never had such a shockingly direct view into his world as the one director Brett Morgen pieced together from Cobain's own archives with the help of Frances Bean. Montage Of Heck is the definitive portrait of Cobain, and it will rattle you as much as Cobain rattled the world.

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