Amoeba Music

The Chicago deep house pioneers are back with a full-length album!

Smooth album of ambient/new-age music. Fans of the ECM label and fretless bass will find this blissful.

What if Joanna Newsom traded her harp for some digital synths and jammed with Kate Bush?

Jazz, sometimes leaning towards Herbie/Headhunters-style fusion, sometimes melting into a soft pile of synthisizer bloops.

The boys have still got it!

Big 90s/00s r&b/pop vibes here, but less for the dancefloor and more for your headphones.

Saxophone and bass duo give jazz takes of songs by Joni Mitchell, Sheryl Crow(!), and David McCallum/David Axelrod ("The Edge").

A new album of instrumental electronic hip-hop from this influential beat scene legend!

Don't be confused by the title- this is contemporary drum 'n bass by one of the leaders of the new guard.

Low-energy, dubby jams in the style of Krautrock kings Can.

I was expecting Ben to suck but it's actually kinda badass? The relationship between the kid (good little actor) and Ben is effective and there's an alluringly surreal quality to this film. Take, for instance, the townsfolk: after each rat attack, said locals gather to observe the aftermath and just stand there silently, frozen in place like a still life. This happens several times and it's very strange. Equally weird is the fact that the ten year old boy is an incredibly gifted musician and songwriter who sits at a piano and writes the title song off the top of his head. He plays Moonlight Sonata on a harmonica at one point. Gene Siskel gave Ben a highly positive review, praising the film for its successful mixture of gross-out horror and genuine drama. He was right. It's a rock solid b-movie.

Moving up my Cronenberg list. The surreal atmosphere of Cosmopolis could choke a horse; all the elements are off-kilter yet easily recognizable. Unmistakably this planet, the era we inhabit. Eric Packer, the dead-eyed billionaire who cruises through a cramped and crumbling urban hellscape in his tomb-like stretch limo, feels real to us despite behaving like a fucking alien. He displays no visible emotion for any living thing, or the fact that his empire is dissipating all around him, but cries his eyes out over a dead pop star he's never met. Like most of Croney's recent efforts, it's heavier on ideas than on spectacle and largely driven by dialogue. It's not easy to get on board with the unusual melding of Cronenberg and DeLillo, but this time around I was fascinated. Cosmopolis is a layered, relevant piece of work where every line delivered both speaks to our world and helps evoke an entirely new one.

Conan the Barbarian is cool and everything, but Dillinger is by far the best movie John Milius ever directed. A fast, mean, ultraviolent crime story brought to life by an amazing cast. Harry Dean Stanton makes such an impression with a minimal amount of screen time. Milius was pretty young back in '73 and his raw, unpolished (somewhat scatterbrained) style works for the material. There's a sense of immediacy to it. You might expect him to present these criminals as macho badasses - which he does, to an extent - but he's equally interested in making fun of fragile masculinity and chipping away at American myths.

Everyone should own this album. It should be distributed to schoolchildren.

Understated, contemplative character study about a kind old soul re-entering the life he abandoned in search of his beloved pet pig. The film follows no predictable pattern or formula. First time writer/director Michael Sarnoski displays real control, creating a slightly stylized yet relatable environment while delving into a criminal element rarely depicted on-screen: the culinary underworld. Shady restaurant black markets. What he's saying about love, loss, passion, and remorse is communicated with powerful clarity thanks to a tight script and remarkable acting from Cage, who turns in his finest performance since Leaving Las Vegas.

An electronic milestone. These guys were masters in the art of sampling. Every song is killer, especially the first two.

One of my top-ten favorite albums. Recently re-released on LP. I'm not a huge shoegaze guy, but this thing is monumental.

Warren deserves more love, especially this album. The title track is one of the greatest rock songs of all time.

From Scream Factory. Overlooked slasher film blessed with a smart script and confident direction from Geoffrey Wright (Romper Stomper). Easily the best flick that emerged from the post-Scream genre boom. It beats Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Valentine, all of 'em. The cast does great work, particularly Brittany Murphy as the unusually strong heroine, and Ken Selden's dialogue is razor-sharp. Even Jay Mohr comes off well. It's an artful, darkly funny sleeper that ranks alongside the classics. The script was first sent to David Lynch, who loved it but declined because he was gearing up to make Mulholland Drive.

All three films in this series were recently given the deluxe treatment by Vinegar Syndrome, but I'm really only recommending the first. Pretentiously silly as it is, The Prophecy is more intelligent and ambitious than your average wide-release horror flick. The story is a bit jumbled (incorporating Native American religious rituals into a Bible-based narrative is an odd choice) but it's always compelling and impeccably cast. Walken and Stoltz are both perfect. They - and other actors like Elias Koteas and Virginia Madsen - make all this hokey nonsense 100% convincing. Widen directs with a sure hand, striking a pleasant tone and maintaining it well; he takes himself seriously but never grows ponderous and successfully incorporates a large amount of dark humor. This is a very funny movie, and not unintentionally. Walken fucking kills it. Hilarious and menacing at the same time. You'll have no problem believing he's been walking the earth for centuries. I saw The Prophecy in the theater when I was nine and loved it. Nice to see that it more-or-less holds up. I found myself saying, "damn, that was pretty cool" a lot more than expected. Viggo Mortensen as Satan chowing down on desert flowers? It's easy to see why this has developed a cult following over time.