“We saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons,” Catherine Earnshaw recounts during her pregnancy-induced bout of psychosis (72). She rips a pillow open with her teeth, exploding feathers into her bedroom. This manic episode has the effect of unspooling a tightly wound thread of repressed emotion and…

Big Thief is a titan of industry, not in the sense that they adjudicate the boundaries and gravitations of the indie folk genre, but purely in the sense that they release music perennially at the vanguard of what music can and should be. …

2022 leaves audiences to sip reluctantly at the dregs of small-scale pandemic movies, often stiflingly political and void of an emotional core, save for a treacly, superficial one. It’s a dreadful way to make art, but one increasingly supplanted by behemoth blockbuster epics that spill fjords of histrionics and innards…

“All the footage was created for broadcast television or by the U.S. military,” reads an early title card in Sierra Pettengill’s 2022 documentary feature “Riotsville, USA,” which screened at BAMPFA on May 1 as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival lineup. …

Published in The Daily Californian July 1, 2021 The concert poster for Perfume Genius’ triumphant return to live performance at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur features a drawing from the cover of a book by the library’s namesake, “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.” Predictably, the…

By Emma Murphree | December 2020 Introduction: Many would consider the act of filmmaking to be a revolutionary pursuit, given that the art form has a long history of promoting countercultural ideas. At the very least, it can be agreed that film is a powerful tool for influencing thought. But…

By Emma Murphree | May 2021 Heralded by TIFF as “A passionate and enthralling narrative fresco in the tradition of the Italian classics”, Pietro Marcello’s 2019 film, Martin Eden, expertly blurs the line between archetypal adaptation of a classic novel, and glaring social critique of contemporary class conflict. Adapted from…