While the city of Toronto has a vibrant arts scene, enjoying it can often be unaffordable. From transport to accommodations to the price of tickets alone, being a patron of the arts is often unrealistic for the everyday person.
Score: 4/5
Pop music pioneer Lady Gaga has returned with her seventh studio album MAYHEM, a chaotic, anthemic examination of her career and impressive flex of her musical prowess.
The 2024 awards season concluded with the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday night. With several predictable wins and surprises, here is a full recap of the ceremony’s awards.
Sludge-stained heaps of snow left over from last weekend’s storm cage in the dwindling crowd hovering around Massey Hall. Whipping winds freeze my extremities as I wait impatiently on the cracked, icy sidewalk outside.
Score: 3/5
Kansas Anymore, ROLE MODEL’s sophomore album, released in July of last year, but the indie singer just surprised his fans with four new songs.
Score: 3.5/5
From Ocean’s 11 to Magic Mike, American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh’s style remains dynamic and undefined, and his latest horror-drama flick Presence is his most technically experimental and challenging endeavour to date.
While the TikTok ban on Jan. 19 stayed in effect for less than 24 hours after Trump put a reprieve in place, the popular entertainment app is still in danger of being censored by the United States Supreme Court, and with it, potentially the voices of many up-and-coming musicians.
Clerel, a Cameroonian-born Canadian artist featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and who is set to play at this year’s SXSW festival, innervated the ears and hearts of an intimate Burlington audience with a set of stripped-back soul-infused ballads during his first live performance of the year. The soul singer sat down to speak with me backstage where he contemplated playing live versus recording in studio, teased the release of his next EP, and got both philosophical and personal about where soul music is today and what the genre means to him.
Score: 3.5/5
The long-anticipated second season of Netflix’s Squid Game is a surprisingly solid follow-up to the show’s original nine episodes, though it doesn’t quite live up to the high bar set by the first season.
Renowned American filmmaker and artist David Lynch passed away at the age of 78 on Jan. 15. His death was felt throughout the film industry and cinephile community. An iconoclast and pioneer, there will never be another quite like Lynch.
Score: 3/5
Gia Coppola’s third film The Last Showgirl is a quiet, intimate portrayal of a woman grappling with her troubled past and uncertain future. It’s a dazzling albeit sobering reflection on social issues around aging.
Score: 4/5
The latest project from American singer-songwriter Hayden Silas Anhedönia, known professionally as Ethel Cain, is an unapologetic, challenging descent into the depths of lust, sexuality, perversion and self-realization.
Click here to read the first part of this series, which focuses on the lore associated with Twenty One Pilots’ album “Trench.” Click here to read the second part of this series, which focuses on the lore associated with the album Scaled and Icy. Click here to read the third part of the series, which focuses on the lore associated with the “Overcompensate” music video.
Score: 4/5
“Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu asks with all the gothic horror immersion needed to portray such a question on the big screen effectively.
In the wake of the annual Hallmark slop that gets dished out every year, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers skyrockets to the ranks of other beloved, acclaimed Christmas classics.
4/5
Kendrick Lamar’s surprise full-length release, GNX, shows the illustrious Compton MC capitalizing on the sagacious bellicosity generated by his decisive victory in the diss-track-mediated pop-culture-spectacle feud he had with Drake over the summer in fun and masterful West Coast hip hop fashion.
