Gritty

The pace quickens, then slows; quickens, slows. Bill Callahan’s voice rumbles over a roiling beat, stitching Partition’s delicate circular melody to a guitar dirge that squares Sonic Youth with Crazy Horse. “You do what you got to do / Do what you’ve got to do … / To touch the picture,” he sings. When the song ends by collapsing in on itself, he says: “Now we’re getting somewhere.”In truth, he’s been on walkabout for an hour by this point. Callahan is touring Reality, an album as bucolic as this set is spiky. Here its…

This epic-scale adaptation of a series of novels by Vilhelm Moberg deserves its 148-minute running time, giving the plot enough space to cover a wide and deep tale of a Swedish community’s transition to the New World in the middle of the 19th century. You’d think this kind of coming-to-America story would by now be as exhausted as the poor soil that farmer Karl-Oskar Nilsson (Gustaf Skarsgaard, one of the less well known members of the illustrious Swedish thespian clan) leaves behind in Scandinavia when he sets off…

via Paramount History has shown on innumerable occasions that gritty, street-level crime thrillers and musicals are two universally popular genres of cinema that are always capable of captivating a crowd, but combining the two seemed out of the question. At least it did, until the acclaimed Blue Story came along. The lo-fi British independent film was written and directed by musician, producer, and filmmaker Rapman, and left a huge impression on those who witnessed the incredible genre-bending effort firsthand.…