Tabla de contenidos para Issue 70 en Under the Radar

It’s funny; sometimes the closer you are to something, the harder it is to remember how special it can be. It’s the root of the phrase, Absence makes the heart grow fonder. For the Swedish-born folk duo, First Aid Kit, they know this maxim well. Comprised of sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg, the group is known for its precise lyrical songwriting and blissful, angelic harmonies. But growing up, as the two sang together around the house, they didn’t think much of their vocal blend. It wasn’t until audiences raved and offered standing ovations that they knew they had something unique and lovely. “I don’t think we realized it until we started playing live,” says Johanna. “Just from people reacting to us singing together in a venue. We were like, ‘We’re…

We asked musicians and actors one simple question: “What’s your all-time favorite movie?” For some it’s a classic they discovered in childhood, for others it’s a film that influenced their music or one that found them at just right time later in life. On the following pages there are horrors films watched at too young an age via irresponsible babysitters or while snowed in with friends, and another film that was first viewed while skipping school. And while quite a few artists couldn’t answer our question or narrow it down to just one movie, the following gave it a try. As a Cassandra who was coming of age in 1990s America, I walked through the world in the shadows of two mythological figures—the cursed Greek oracle known for her tragically…

I felt like I should say Citizen Kane or 8 1/2, but I’m actually going to go with The Fall, which is a movie by the Indian director Tarsem Singh that came out in 2006. Just because it’s a movie I would watch over and over and over. I think it’s really that good and a lot of people haven’t seen it. Lee Pace is in it along with this five-year-old Romanian girl, Catinca Untaru. Pace plays a stunt double in the 1910s and gets injured. He ends up in the same hospital with the girl who broke her arm picking oranges with her family. It’s a beautiful film. Basically the two of them strike up a friendship and he tells her a story. So it goes from the hospital…

Mistress America is definitely in my top five movies. I’ve probably seen it 10 times and most recently watched it with my aunt and sister over the holidays in 2020. It’s similar to a lot of [co-screenwriter/director] Noah Baumbach and [co-screenwriter] Greta Gerwig films, but I feel it’s one of the more underrated ones. The dialogue reminds me of a 1940s or 1950s film with how fast paced it is, and I love that about it. I lived in New York [where the film is set] for about three months to record my debut album, Ratchet, before I moved to Philly. I lived in Brooklyn and I just came across so many people, specifically women, but not necessarily gender-specific, that reminded me of Greta’s character [Brooke]. And I was also…

Of course song-parody master “Weird Al” Yankovic wouldn’t be interested in a normal biopic. He instead satirizes biopic tropes with Weird: The Al Yankovic Story , mainly (but not only) by casting Daniel Radcliffe in the title role, despite the Harry Potter star’s lack of resemblance to the accordion wielding comedic musician behind hit spoofs such as “Like a Surgeon” and “Eat It.” Yankovic co-wrote the Roku Channel movie with director Eric Appel, with whom he’s been friends since the latter made a faux biopic trailer about a clichéd hard partying, hard rocking Weird Al for Funny Or Die in 2010. So what does the director think of some of the biggest films of the genre he and Yankovic are skewering? One that isn’t deserving of such barbs, according…

I was 20 in 1987 and studying English Literature at North London Polytechnic (now the University of North London), where one of my units covered Joe Orton, so it seemed like kismet when Prick Up Your Ears came out, a biopic of the playwright with a screenplay by Alan Bennett. Plus I’d just that week seen one of its stars, Wallace Shawn (who plays Orton’s biographer John Lahr), on the tube who, noting my wide-eyed celebrity-spot, smiled at me warmly, which wasn’t the usual response I got from commuters given my punky looks. Director Stephen Frears had already made a hit gay romance with My Beautiful Launderette, making a bleach-blond heartthrob of Daniel Day Lewis. But Prick Up Your Ears still felt risqué—documenting the exploits of an openly gay man…

Music documentaries tend to fall into two categories: ones that aim for some greater truth about a musician, movement, or scene and films that hope to capture a notable performance or festival. And some try to do both. It’s hard to truly replicate the live music experience for cinema or home audiences, but the best performance films not only make you feel like you were actually there on the night, but also give illuminating context to the event. Would the original Woodstock festival be so iconic without Michael Wadleigh’s documentary, released less than a year after the hippie event? Our writers watched or re-watched many of the most notable music docs and we came up with this list of the 40 all-time best. (Note: Most of our writers hadn’t yet…

Cinema history is filled with a multitude of fictional bands we wish we could experience in real life. A select few have even leapt from the silver screen to the concert stage, but most have remained trapped in celluloid. Some make-believe bands only appear in the background, such as The Weird Sisters (a supergroup fronted by Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and also featuring Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Phil Selway), who perform at a school dance in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Many others are interregnal to the plot, such as Blackgammon in The Sound of Metal, an Oscar-winning film about a metal drummer going deaf that featured a cameo from Under the Radar, with the band appearing on a fake cover of our magazine. We took stock of all…

Adaptation was sort of unlike anything else I’d ever seen. I loved every character, and I thought the story was really incredible. I connected with both of the twins [played by Nicolas Cage] really deeply, but mostly the main one, Charlie Kaufman [also the name of the film’s screenwriter]. I suppose it was just one of those really selfish things where I saw myself in that character, and so I connected deeply with it. When my last album came out during COVID, people were like, “Okay, well, this is the way the world is now, and this is what you’re expected to do.” I was supposed to get a TikTok account and start doing that. I was like, “I’m not going to become a different person. It’s not happening.” That…

The history of the film is kind of seeped in connections to the pop world. I suppose there’s so many musical connections in that it was funded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in part and it’s got the Don Cherry soundtrack. And Finder’s Keepers Records released [the soundtrack] a few years back. In a way it’s a kind of movie that feels like a music video in a sense. There’s not much dialogue and it’s a kind of pop film in its own weird way. What I love it about it as well is that it’s shot in Mexico City, which is probably one of the greatest cities that I’ve ever gotten to visit. It kind of uses the building from Mexican modernism back to the colonial cathedral and…

“Ping! Ping! Ping!” go the message notifications on Johnny Marr’s speakers, interrupting his answers during a Zoom interview until the Mancunian guitarist says, with faux indignation: “Go away, Hans Zimmer!” His friend and collaborator on a number of blockbuster movie soundtracks was messaging Marr in the weeks before audiences could finally see the long delayed new James Bond installment, No Time to Die, and hear the duo’s fittingly debonair and dangerous accompanying music. Keen as Marr was for 007 diehards to finally see the new movie after it was pushed back several months throughout the pandemic, current Bond Daniel Craig isn’t ex-The Smiths’ guitarist’s favorite to take on the role. Instead, he loves the 1969, George Lazenby starring classic On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. There are a few reasons why…

As it relates to the music that I make and that Animal Collective makes in general, it was really an eye-opening experience the first time I saw it. We were like 15, it was Dave [Portner, aka Avey Tare] and me, and we were snowed in at a friend’s house. There were a bunch of people there. Dave and I had some mushrooms and we took them, and somebody suggested, “Oh we should watch The Shining.” We were snowed in and this was ’94 or ’95. It was before cellphones, and nobody made plans or looked at the weather so we all just called our parents and said, “We’re stuck here.” So, we watched it and it was really amazing, and everybody kind of left to go outside. And…

We interviewed many musicians for the My Favorite Movie Issue, but what we might not have seen coming was the deep connection that some artists have with their favorite film. There are some hilarious comedies that people claim as their favorite, but for some the impact of their favorite movie goes much deeper than that. Such as Ezra Furman’s lifelong relationship with Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, and seeing herself in Harvey Keitel’s character. Or in this case, how Kevin Morby resonated with Jason Schwartzman’s character, Max Fischer, in writer/director Wes Anderson’s 1998 film Rushmore, the first time he saw it as a teenager. Morby and Schwartzman made an immediate connection over our nearly two-and-a-half hour Zoom interview. Ironically, both of their partners, Schwartzman’s wife Brady Cunningham and Morby’s partner Katie…

To conclude, we ask Elizabeth Stokes of The Beths some questions about endings and death. The New Zealand band formed in 2014, with vocalist/guitarist Stokes originally meeting guitarist Jonathan Pearce in high school. The current lineup also features bassist Benjamin Sinclair and drummer Tristan Deck. The band’s harmony-laced indie pop backs up Stokes’ often-wry and autobiographical lyrics. After all, the band’s 2018-released debut album was amusingly titled Future Me Hates Me and their recently released third album is titled Expert in a Dying Field. The new album was launched by “Silence is Golden,” a decidedly loud and energetic first single in contrast to its title. “The song is about stress and anxiety manifesting as an intolerance to noise,” said Stokes in a press release announcing the album. “Where each new…

We’re all huge Pedro Almodóvar fans in Special Interest. Truly. Deeply. I have Rossy de Palma’s face tattooed on my body. Despite my love for so many of Almodóvar’s films I’d have to say my all time favorite movie is definitely Todo sobre mi madre [aka All About My Mother]. It truly has it all: torrential maternal emotions, psychedelic color, extreme wit, sensitive mundanity, fabulous costumes, a woman named Smoke, an errant nun, dyke drama, drug drama, problematic dialogue, Spanish guitar as a train traverses the countryside montage, cryptic noir-esque monologues performed by strong hurt women! Life, death, forgiveness, hope! Ceclia Roth is utterly captivating as the flawed, perfect mother, but for real, the performances across the board are just incredible. Agrado (played by Antonia San Juan) is, in my…

It’s always difficult to answer the question “what is your favorite film” because it all depends on where my head is at that moment. However there is something to be said about the impact a film can have on you as a teenager, a time when you are starting to work out who you are and your place in the world and the movie that I still hold close to my heart is John Hughes’ Pretty in Pink. In my fuzzy memory I first saw it when I was about 12 years old on a random cable channel as a re-run 20 or so years after it had first been released. It was repeated every week and I watched it each time. The opening scenes of Andie [Molly Ringwald] getting…

“I Was Neon,” the third single from PRE PLEASURE, the third album by Australian singer/songwriter Julia Jacklin, is a catchy, largely guitar-driven examination of oneself, exploring a dichotomy between acceptance of self and fear of losing that very acceptance. This track’s refrain—“Am I gonna lose myself again?/I quite like the person that I am”—perfectly encapsulates the themes and rhythms of PRE PLEASURE: an album all about openness and self-acceptance. “Songwriting is all a process,” Jacklin says, “processing things and hoping that you will write a song and emerge at the other end with more understanding. This is true sometimes but I think most of the time, it’s not that cathartic.” The pitfalls of “pre pleasure”—meaning if you work hard enough on things (music, relationships, life), you’ll eventually get to enjoy…

Much like your favorite album, where so much of it is your mood and circumstantially dependent on where you’re at and what you want to experience. Sometimes you want a movie to make you think, and sometimes you want pure entertainment. I would say that one movie that’s had a lot of resonance for me in my life, and in a new way—I’ve always loved the film, but a movie that I the layers of its brilliance more and more—is Raising Arizona by the Coen brothers. I loved it when it came out. I thought it was hilarious. And now that I am a parent, it is absolutely, to me, the most spot on movie about parenting in so many ways—the madness and the chaos of it. It’s got so…

Sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg, who comprise the acclaimed Swedish folk duo, First Aid Kit, can recite lines from the Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from memory. The film, which stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, was named as one of the American Film Institute’s Top 10 movies from 2004. Written by legendary screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), the romantically focused work features any number of great moments of dialogue and drama. “It’s my favorite film,” says Johanna, who says she rewatched it again recently. She’d originally seen it as at 14 years old but now, at 31, the movie hits differently. She knows the wounds that heartbreak can offer more acutely. She knows the sorrow at lost chances and how time never goes…

When I got the call to contribute to this, I jumped at the opportunity. I said to myself, “This will be easy; a lay-up!” I was wrong. I did not anticipate having to put serious thought into this endeavor. There are a few movies that I could’ve gone to for this (honorable mentions being Coming to America and The Devil Wears Prada), but when I contemplated my overall enjoyment, and personal impact of a film, Beverly Hills Cop swiftly reached the top of my list. This classic is set in 1980s Detroit and Los Angeles. Undercover police officer Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) goes rogue and uses his vacation time to investigate the murder of a childhood friend, which leads him to Los Angeles. Once there, he enlists the help of…

What is John Lithgow’s favorite role, among the eclectic 60-plus movies he’s been in since the 1970s? Action fans would advocate for his scenery scarfing villains in Ricochet and Cliffhanger (which were less nuanced than his current nebulously intentioned antagonist on the FX TV drama The Old Man). Millions of children grew up hearing him voice Lord Farquaad in Shrek. Not forgetting Footloose, Harry and the Hendersons, Interstellar, and TV’s 3rd Rock from the Sun. And of course there’s his ahead-of-its-time and Oscar nominated portrayal of transgender character Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp in 1982. Aside from ranking high among many movie buffs, and being one of his most memorable experiences as a film actor, Garp also helped Lithgow realize his preference for being directed. The 1982…

Music biopics are notorious for fudging the facts a little, but the most enduring ones capture the true essence of an artist, even if things didn’t happen exactly the same way in real life. And the most memorable ones are often anchored by a magnetic star performance, one that goes deeper than simply copying the mannerisms and stage movements of an icon. This is our list of the 30 all-time best music biopics, voted on by our writers and stretching, by release date, from 1953’s The Glenn Miller Story all the way to this year’s Elvis. (Note: Our writers were not able to see Weird: The Al Yankovic Story prior to putting together this list, so it was not eligible.) By Mark Redfern 1. 24 Hour Party People (2002) Also…

“Those songs are seared into me. I mean, I start crying when the movie starts now,” John Darnielle says as he settles onto his couch, having just sung a line from “Sunrise, Sunset.” The Mountain Goats frontman, known for his richly detailed songwriting (as found on the band’s latest album, Bleed Out, released on Merge in August) and deeply human not-quite-horror novels, was five years old when his mom and aunt saw Fiddler on the Roof at the movie theater without him. A devastated young Darnielle was appeased with a vinyl recording of the musical, which he became obsessed with. “That was good compensation because I would listen to the soundtrack and try to piece the story together from the songs and be thrilled by these Jewish melodies, which are…

I don’t know if I’m comfortable calling this my “favorite” movie (honestly, I’m don’t know if I’m comfortable calling anything my favorite anything), but I’m fairly certain the movie I’ve seen the most times—and laughed at every time—is the 1977 hockey comedy Slap Shot. I honestly don’t give a shit about hockey or pretty much about any sport, but Slap Shot isn’t really about hockey. Depending on which angle you look at it from, Slap Shot is about owners versus freelancers, about the pitiful pageant of manliness, about the capitalist ransacking of small-town America, about the zen-like meaninglessness of pretty much any endeavor, and—crucially to me—it’s about New England. Although if you were from Canada you’d think maybe it was about Canada. It’s also about hockey. Going further: If you’re…

In a scene toward the end of Stand By Me, the 1986 Rob Reiner-directed adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 novella The Body, Gordie Lachance (Wil Wheaton) and Chris Chambers (River Phoenix) stand side-by-side. They discuss the future and wonder what junior high will be like. As Chris walks away, the adult Gordie narrating the film tells the viewer that Chris tries to break up a fight years later, forever the peacemaker, and is stabbed in the neck and killed. The Chris on-screen holds up a hand to wave goodbye, and then vanishes from view. The moment is quietly devastating, made more painful with the knowledge of Phoenix’s actual death in 1993. “That scene always landed on me really hard, even before River died,” says Wheaton, 36 years after the film’s…

Number one, I know fuck all about films…but I’ve chosen Dig! because it brought loads of people that I’m friends with together. It’s a documentary about The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols in the ’90s. It’s kind of less that I want to talk about the film and more how the film brought me into having loads of great friendships with other musicians. I remember watching it at my best friend’s house on YouTube broken into parts, so you have seven minutes at a time. I remember there was a group of about seven of us lying on the floor watching it and just being in awe of how cool it was and how great the music was. I feel like it’s one of those things where if…

When putting together a list of the Top 100 Movie Soundtracks of All Time we set out some rules. Firstly, albums that were purely a film’s orchestral score were out (sorry John Williams, Ennio Morricone, et al.). The soundtracks had to feature songs used in the film (a few score tracks added in as well was fine). In general, musicals were out, especially those based on Broadway stage shows (although at least two musicals snuck on the list). The albums didn’t just have to include songs written especially for the film; plenty of great soundtracks consist of mainly pre-existing songs curated by a music supervisor and director. Soundtracks featuring the songs of just one artist (looking at you Prince, Badly Drawn Boy, Curtis Mayfield, Air, Madonna, Queen, and Björk) were…

I was 17 years old, I’d just passed my driving test and I would sometimes skip school to drive to Manchester in my mum’s car. I’d look around the upmarket shops and restaurants with a kind of detached fascination—city life was highly exotic to me. On one occasion when Manchester’s weather was typically apocalyptic, I found shelter in a nearby picture house. (I was up for watching anything so long as it was warm and dry inside.) The film that I opted for was Lost in Translation—I figured it seemed arty enough to fulfil my excruciatingly poetic aspirations at the time. I was about to experience a piece of cinema that would ingratiate me into a whole new genre of inner feeling—an emotion which I knew was there but couldn’t…

SPELLLING (stage name of musician Chrystia Cabral) makes music that feels like what the inside of a crystal ball would sound like. Her most recent album, 2021’s The Turning Wheel , is a theatrical wonder, draped in red velvet curtains and jewel tones, that simultaneously pulls from soul and R&B and more avant-garde pop artists like Kate Bush. It’s no surprise, then, that her favorite film is the 1978, Motownproduced version of The Wiz , based on the Broadway musical. “My mom was a big fan of the movie and we would watch it around Christmas time with family. I became instantly obsessed,” Cabral says. “I also loved Labyrinth with David Bowie. Those together kind of forged my early fascination with musicals and fantasy and costume.” The Wiz,…

I used to have this thing on tour called Dan’s DV days, where I would buy a DVD every day on tour, particularly from gas stations, because that’s the number one place you go as a musician on tour is to a gas station. And they used to have these massive bins of DVDs, some of legitimate films, like There Will Be Blood, but most of the time I was trying to buy knockoff title movies you could only see if you bought a DVD at a gas station. My favorite is The Lord Protector, made to look like Lord of the Rings. Transmorphers is really good. Billy Owens and the Secret of the Runes is a Harry Potter ripoff that’s really good. And I buy one of these a…

In the midst of making this new record one of the biggest memories I’ll have is just having family movie nights [during the pandemic], and us clutching each other, you know, my partner and I just not knowing how to express our fear, but also feeling strangely calm. We went through a bunch of classics like Bad News Bears to The Karate Kid, sharing with our son all our favorite films. I remember a particular day—and we had watched this movie a bunch because it was his favorite, and has become mine—but on this particular day we were watching The Sandlot. It was during one of those moments where things were looking better in the pandemic and then something else happened to set things back, and so we were in…

After watching a good film I often find that my memory falls victim to an unrelenting force and I am unable to interface with my mind, now assailed by the audiovisual stimuli that has pleased it so for the 100 minutes just passed, in order to extract any kind of cohesive gleanings. It’s that experience of a mood, so intangible and too challenging to really put into words, that I love about cinema and music and all forms of art that I often end up calling my favorite. That beautiful feeling of when a film causes the brain fog to supersede any understanding of a world that is barely presenting itself as real, and to be understood. I want to talk about a film that I saw recently that I…

The Matrix is my favorite movie of all time. I first saw The Matrix when I was 11 (maybe a bit too young?) and loved it for the sci-fi and fighting scenes. The soundtrack of the movie exposed me to industrial and nu-metal music at an early age. Mainly The Prodigy, Rage Against The Machine, and Rob Zombie—bands that were fusing noise and rock with electronic music. Those bands turned me onto bands that I would deep dive into during most of my childhood, like Nine Inch Nails and Rammstein. Those bands were a segue into earlier bands like Joy Division, New Order, and Gary Numan. The intersection between electronic music and rock music has always been a big interest of mine, which had a big influence on [GIFT’s debut…

My all-time favorite movie is a bat-shit sci-fi film called The Fifth Element. It’s one of the most creative, fun, insane movies ever made, and I can’t believe this was only Luc Besson’s second English language film (he went from Léon: The Professional to this). It’s got all the hallmarks of a great adventure film: humor, some scary moments, incredible action sequences, romance, but with all these wild quirks that only a cocky French filmmaker could pull off. It’s so colorful in every sense of the word, from the expansive sets to the garish costuming, plus some of the cutest, wobbly, chunky alien robot guys you’ve ever seen. And while Besson should be canonized for taking the chances he took, it’s the performances that seal the deal. Every side-character had…

Marlon Williams is beaming in from London. Fresh off the plane, he’s in the UK and Europe for a string of shows opening for fellow New Zealand singer/songwriter (and massive pop star) Lorde. “Small New Zealand, all paths eventually meet,” says Williams with a grin. Williams is excited to be on the road again, after nearly two years of isolation in New Zealand. The 31-year old singer/songwriter and actor (2018’s A Star is Born, Netflix’s Sweet Tooth) has a half hour set before Lorde, which he says will give him a fun opportunity to try some of the new songs from his third solo album, My Boy. “I’ll try a set the first night and then completely swap it out on night two,” he says. This is the kind of…

Sipping Blue Rev, a sweet alcopop, at the local skating rinks in Cape Breton—an island in Nova Scotia, Canada—is a much cherished memory of singer, Molly Rankin, from Toronto-based dream pop band, Alvvays. It suggests a time of innocence and simpler pleasures and felt like the right antidote when Rankin, her partner, guitarist, Alec O’Hanley, and their keyboardist, Kerri MacLellan were writing their third album in the garage of their home, during the dark days of the pandemic. Blue Rev is also the title of the album. “I think I just like the idea of being transported back to another era of your life by taking a sip of something,” explains an upbeat Rankin, who cites two polar opposite “Strawberry Wine” songs, one a 1996 country hit for Deana Carter,…

My favorite movie right now is eXistenZ, a Cronenberg sci-fi from 1999. Couldn’t walk you through the plot if I wanted to, as it’s a wildly convoluted story within a story within a story. The gist is that an electronics company is showing its new fleshy VR gaming consoles (imagine an Xbox that looks like a gently pulsing flesh sack) to a focus group. There’s a group of assassins committed to destroying the devices, there’s the world-renowned game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) trying to escape them, and everybody’s entering the game via “bio ports” that are surgically inserted into their spines. One of the things I love about the movie, and Cronenberg films in general, is how there are philosophical factions in his universes that extremize debates we…

The Grammy Award-nominated 47-year-old songwriter, Sufjan Stevens, says he has a fixation with films. Yet, even more than most, Stevens can take that love of movies to another level. Stevens, who in 2021 released an entire record he co-wrote with fellow musician Angelo De Augustine called A Beginner’s Mind, inspired almost entirely by more than a dozen movies, can become subsumed by them. It’s as if the light emanates from the screen and both pulls in and melds with his eyes and ears and entire body. “It’s such a full-on immersive experience,” says Stevens. “I think that’s where we go to lose ourselves and enter into another world and become infused with the world completely and entirely. It’s really a beautiful and full-on visceral, tactile experience.” “Because the babysitter watched…

This might seem like a weird choice, and in many ways it is, but something about this movie has stuck with me for many months after watching it. I love war movies like Apocalypse Now or The Deer Hunter, they stir something in me. I also love Ryan Gosling in Drive. Asha [Lorenz] (my colleague in Sorry and bff) has a more acquired taste and loves Gaspar Noé, especially Enter the Void, and when younger Requiem for a Dream. I remember being 13/14 and finding it very cool and kinda weird that she, from such an early age, liked stuff as intriguing and complex as those movies, and then in turn taught me to be open to that leftfield side of culture. When you as a young human discover stuff…

My all-time favorite film has to be Picnic at Hanging Rock, directed by Peter Weir. It’s a lean film that’s mesmerizing and hallucinatory. I only have to listen to the first few notes of the title theme and I’m transported to the hazy desert, wearing a Victorian smock dress and holding a parasol. The film tells the tale of a girl’s boarding school day trip that goes terribly wrong when three of the girls and a teacher vanish at Hanging Rock, a geological outcropping near the school. There’s not a huge amount of action in the film, instead Weir creates a force you feel while watching. As the film progresses you’re pulled in by this magnetism and enveloped by the heat and languorousness of an Australian afternoon. There’s a lovely…

The 1980s were a golden age in regards to amazing real life musicians showing up as themselves on the silver screen. We’re talking scenes where fictional characters are in a club or at a concert and in the background some buzz-worthy musician is performing. Such performances are often superfluous to the plot, but add atmosphere to a scene or allow a director to show off his or her hip musical tastes. We have combed through decades of movie clips to highlight the 30 performances that were most iconic. To be clear, this isn’t about scenes featuring fictional bands or moments from music documentaries. This is a young Madonna performing “Crazy For You” as Matthew Modine and Linda Fiorentino dance for the first time in Vision Quest . Wilson Phillips…

There’s a scene in T he Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent where Pedro Pascal’s character asks Nicolas Cage, “What’s your favorite movie?” Nicolas responds that it’s an impossible question to answer because it depends on so many factors—mood, timing, etc. I feel the same. It’s hard to pick a favorite movie. There have been a lot of movies I’ve loved and gone back to over the years. The top position has been fairly nebulous. But one that came into my life at probably the exact right time and has really stuck with me is Heathers . I first saw Heathers on TV one afternoon in high school. Flipping through channels, I landed on it, and something about it caught my eye. I caught it pretty close to the beginning…

“My work is not me,” utters David Bowie about three quarters into Moonage Daydream, the latest music documentary from Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck director Brett Morgen. It’s a startling revelation as up to that point, we mostly see Bowie, as the consummate performer: On stage in London at peak Ziggy Stardust—in various guises but always flame-orange hair, kabuki-make up, and skinny unitard—singing over deafening screams, whilst outside emotional fans profess their adoration to him. It’s pandemonium again when he performs at packed arenas Stateside. One Los Angeles clip shot inside a limousine has a gaunt and cocaine-addled Bowie admit that he detests the city that he resided in for a year, and all it represents. He later confirms what lengths he will go to for his songwriting when he…

I think I first saw this when I was about 15 years old. Obviously, the director Nicolas Roeg has such an incredible eye and it’s also scored by John Barry, who is one of my all-time favorite composers. There’s something about those tremulous strings that only he can do, and the Walkabout main theme is my favourite piece of music ever, which is why I picked it! It’s such a rich piece of work, it’s so brutal, tragic, visceral, sexual, and sad. There are these huge vast landscapes highlighting the brutality of nature set against a kind of primal human endeavour but it’s done in such a subtle intimate way. And of course, it’s a coming-of-age movie, which really resonated with me when I first saw it. (Rose Elinor Dougall…

My memory of seeing Blade Runner for the first time is fuzzy. After all, I was only 11 years old when it came out and I didn’t see it in the theater. I’m pretty sure my older brother Peter did and later hipped me to it. Over time I’ve come to watch the film on a regular basis. It has become a “comfort film” for me. I have watched it so many times that I know most of the dialogue by heart. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ll put it on headphones and only listen to the film; by the time we meet Rachael, I’m out cold. This is the only film that I watch this way and I like a lot of films. Of course: We could talk about…

Leave it to the duo of Whitney to choose favorite movies from far-flung corners of the Earth—as wide ranging as the sounds from their latest album, SPARK. Drummer/singer Julien Ehrlich’s mind has been on Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, while guitarist Max Kakacek leans towards Chungking Express, directed by the Hong Kong cinema master Wong Kar-wai. Wong’s freewheeling film and Vinterberg’s more sobering one seemingly have little in common outside of one scene of alcoholic overindulgence in Chungking Express. A constant state of inebriation is the glue that bonds the characters of Another Round together, led by Mads Mikkelsen as a washed up high school history teacher. Kakacek shares of Wong’s classic 1994 film: “I first watched it when I was in my early 20s. And then more recently…

“What else have I failed at recently?” Maya Hawke smiles and asks rhetorically about the seemingly unthinkable. She’s talking about guttering during her first crack at bowling. But fans would be forgiven for thinking she can do no wrong. After all, Hawke had a winning summer with both the new season of the widely watched Netflix drama Stranger Things and with her sophomore album MOSS , 13 tracks of gently strummed and whisper-sung folk-pop . Both left fans and critics raving. Those triumphs built on her role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood . And her fans have plenty more to look forward to, such as her upcoming roles in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. But success hasn’t gone to the…

I literally don’t have a favorite film. I’ve got 10 categories of favorite films that do different things in different places. Favorite films tend to be, with everybody, it’s about the age we encountered something. Way up on the list of favorite films would be Psycho, way up on the favorite films list would be so many films, Polanski films, Kurosawa films. What I tend to notice, when people talk about this stuff, I’ll say, “You know, what was the scariest film you ever saw,” for example, they’ll tell me a film they saw at a very specific age. If you’re a certain age, and you saw Jaws, it’s like, “Oh, my God, I couldn’t go in the water for years, the ocean.” And for me, I didn’t think twice…

I first saw Mean Streets when I was in college. I was already in love with Taxi Driver and there was a time I would say Taxi Driver was my favorite film. And then I saw Mean Streets and I just think it’s a superior film. The main character, Charlie [played by Harvey Keitel], is quite repressed. He’s waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and thinking about eternal punishment in hell. He’s trying to be some version of a spiritual person, but he’s in this world [of gangsters] where he’s completely blocked by the culture he’s in. And that is where I was a lot of my own life. I’ve been trying to reach toward beauty as something I’m not allowed to have. I’m…

Archers of Loaf Reason in Decline (MERGE) After 24 years away, Chapel Hill’s Archers of Loaf return with their fifth album, the follow up to 1998’s White Trash Heroes. If you arrive at Reason in Decline expecting a continuation of the loose-limbed, wild-eyed, and reckless Loaf of old, you will be surprised at what you find. Their appeal back then lay partly in their delectably haphazard nature, Eric Bachmann’s screamed melodies and vicious lyrics striving to surface through crashing waves of Eric Johnson’s guitar. Here, though, slacker cynicism has turned to focused stoicism; fast and loose now measured and taut. There’s no pretence of recapturing the shabby, shimmering thrills of the past—this is absolutely, definitively not a nostalgia record—instead offering a modern, masterful document of the personal and political, turning…

I’ve thought about it long and hard. I’m a big fan of Werner Herzog, the director who did Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre , the Wrath of God. However, I would have to say Nosferatu, with the actor Klaus Kinski, would be at the top of my list. It was the music in it that got me. Popol Vuh is the artist who did the soundtrack and it was the first time I had heard this enchanting, weird musical soundtrack that had this sound. It was a horror movie, but it was more like a silent horror movie, which of course, it was in its original form in the 1920s. Herzog has a particular atmosphere that he always has in his movies. Just the way that he combined the music, the…