Not merely an addendum to Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground, Ed Lachman’s Songs For Drella is a ravishingly beautiful, sometimes thrilling audiovisual recording of a song cycle by Lou Reed and John Cale, the founders of the Velvet Underground. Cale and Reed’s early musical collaboration as the VU was inspired but unlikely – they had diametrically opposed musical roots and passions. Short lived as the band was, it became the source for punk, glam, and whatever followed from those fundamentally subversive pop genres. The VU began sliding toward death when Reed effectively fired Cale in 1968. (He had fired their first producer, Andy Warhol, […]

In August 2019, when Steven Soderbergh shot Let Them All Talk, COVID-19 was not on his mind, except to the degree that his research on Contagion (2011) had convinced him that a pandemic similar to the one depicted in the film was inevitable. And yet, one of the most compelling aspects of the workaholic director’s latest feature (streaming this Fall on HBO Max) is that the eight-day Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2, during which most of the movie is set, now can be read as a metaphor for the necessarily transformational journey from before to after COVID. In […]