miroirs no. 3

I saw Christian Petzold's delicate music box puzzle of a film at the New York Film Festival. 

It's coming to theaters this year, opening at Film at Lincoln Center and IFC Center in New York, and Laemmle Royal in LA on March 20.

jeffery berg's top 10 singles of 2025!

Here goes my Top 10 singles of 2025!

10.

Voodoo / Micah Dailey-White 

A grand, mischievous neo-soul doozy.

9. 

Night to Night / The Magician

The Magician dizzy dance song reworks Baltimora's "Tarazan Boy" with a murderous bass lick.

8.

Ends Meet / Panda Bear

A dreamy, swirling confection.

7.

Crème Brûlée / David Archuleta

Criminally overlooked sticky, slinky pop number.

6.

Relationships / Haim

The harmonies are gorgeous on Haim's topsy turvy, mixed emotion relationship drama.

5.

Orlando in Love / Japanese Breakfast

Referencing the poetry of Matteo Maria Boiardo, this song is a wonderful mesh of Michelle Zauner's vulnerable vocals with a longing, guitar strummed melody.

4.

Dracula / Tame Impala

The party goes on into the AM, with Tame Impala's infectious clubber. A refreshing ditty to hit the pop charts this year.

3. 

Sweet Danger / Obongjayar

Obongjayar's bumping banger delivers simmering seduction. 

2. 

Before You Break My Heart / Jade

Effectively sampling The Supremes with a rubbery pop beat, Jade's notched another sublime tune in her young discography.

1. 

Puddle of (Me) / Saya Gray

With its echoing beats and layered guitars and catchy chord changes, this unique tune from the talented Canadian artist goes on a surprising journey.

 

All the best of 2025 is available below on my Spotify list!

jeffery berg's top 10 albums of 2025!

2025 brought forth a slew of tense, fraught records across all genres.

10.

NO VALIDATION / Che Noir & The Other Guys

Mesmerizing flows, jazzy beats and contemplative lyrics from the New York-based rapper and production duo. 

9.

THE SUMMER PORTRAITS / Ludovico Einaudi

Before Summer broke, I planted marigolds to Einaudi's pleasing melodies and orchestrations on this disc of ekphrastic pieces.

8.

LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT / Clipse

Clipse's first album in over 15 years, is plentiful with crisp, Pharrell-produced tracks. Nearly every cut kills.

7.

WEST END GIRL / Lily Allen

Terse and achingly sad, Allen's delivered what could be one of the all-time tell-all's. 

6.

LOTUS / Little Simz

A continuation of Little Simz's grand talents boiled down to a more stripped-down than usual, but still potent, effort.

5.

I QUIT / HAIM

Sunny Californian melodies and breezy idiosyncrasies shine on the sisters's wide-ranging, relentlessly appealing record.

4.

THAT'S SHOWBIZ BABY! / JADE    

The long-awaited full LP release from JADE, whose litany of previous singles were heavyweights since 2024, delivered and then some.

3. 

DON'T TAP THE GLASS / Tyler, the Creator

Another vivacious work from the talented artist (his last record, 2024's Chromakopia, was also extraordinary). This one is in a poppier, vintage R&B vein. Th album was marketed with brilliant anti-marketing marketing. 

2.

EURASEXUA / EURASEXUA AFTERGLOW / FKA twigs

An elegant mishmash of pop and electronica over FKA twigs' gossamer vocals.

1.

PARADISE NOW / Obongjayar

I hadn't really listened to Nigerian, London-based Obongjayar's solo work prior to 2025 (his Little Simz duet, "Point and Kill," a 2021 jewel), his bouncy, deceptively pleasurable sophomore record quickly became a favorite. 

I associate utopia with a destination. We’re constantly searching for a better “elsewhere”, because our current situation never seems good enough. But the ugliness we project onto our environment is just a mental construct, as if we had created the very obstacles we wish to overcome. On that cover, I’m trying to break through a glass ceiling – the one I created myself. -Obongjayar

Obongjayar photo by George Muncey.

A look back at my Top 10 of 2024 when the Pet Shop Boys slayed.

A massive Spotify playlist of all my 2025 favorites here!

3 poems in front porch magazine

Three of my poems, "Handy Man," "Ponderosa," and "Afterlife" are now up here in a the Southern Gothic issue of Front Porch Magazine. 

2 poems at the crawfish

The lovely journal, The Crawfish, just posted two of my poems, "Yearbook, 1986" and "Somewhere in Time" here. 

Both are in my forthcoming collection, Re-Animator, available to preorder here at Indolent Books.

rebuilding

My review of Max Walker-Silverman's Rebuilding is now up at Film-Forward.

Josh O'Connor is continuing his streak of excellent taciturn turns.

via Bleecker Street 

jay kelly

There's an appropriately wistful atmosphere to Noah Baumbach's rambling, occasionally grand Jay Kelly. To care about an uber-rich movie star (George Clooney) and his overworked, but privileged manager (Adam Sandler)... in this economy? Perhaps it's precisely because the film is so out of sync with the current mood that it becomes oddly appealing. At the New York Film Festival, it played like a brief salve out of a slate of more distressing, intricate and formally complicated pictures. 

Clooney agnostics may struggle to connect with Jay Kelly, a self-absorbed performer, whose Sharpied-over gray hairs and ice-crackling-in-a-glass-of-bourbon charm, doesn't stray much from the actor's public persona. Before Clooney became the slick, classy, Oscar-winning movie star in the tradition of Cary Grant (name-checked, along with a slew of other icons), he was the heartthrob doc on ER, a juggernaut from the bygone era when millions watched the same TV episode at the same time. We learn little about Kelly's career, beyond its obvious financial success (perhaps, artistically dubious). The opening sequence, an impressively mounted peek at the busy, multifaceted efforts of a film crew upon a faux-Brooklyn soundstage, ends with Kelly giving a halting, dramatic monologue before his picture wrap. Variations of that sequence echo throughout the film. 

In the present day storyline, Kelly is a solitary figure with no romantic partner, though he's constantly surrounded by people who rush and buzz around him. His closest relationship is with longtime manager, Ron (Sandler), though the two talk at each other more than with one another. It's like a marriage grown stale, their conversations running on separate melodic lines. His publicist, Liz (Laura Dern, in manic worrywart mode reminiscent of, but more redundant than her role in Is This Thing On?), is high strung and incessantly frazzled by every Kelly schedule change and slipup.

There's a relative emotional aloofness among his family as well. Kelly's youngest daughter (Grace Edwards) is beginning to forge a new path in her early twenties, off to travel the world. A scene between them at their backyard pool immediately recalls a key father-daughter moment from Alexander Payne's Clooney-starrer The Descendants (perhaps a coincidence, though Baumbach's film often seems to wear its cinematic references lovingly on its sleeve). Kelly is much less close to his eldest, Jessica (Riley Keough), a grade-school teacher who still carries the traumas of his long absences during her childhood. When he mentions traveling to Tuscany to receive a lifetime achievement award, no one seems eager to join him.

The death of a cherished director, Peter (Jim Broadbent), who gave Kelly his first big break, combined with a run-in with an old acting colleague, Timothy (Billy Crudup), cracks open a layer of long repressed introspection for Kelly. Flashbacks, with Charlie Rowe as the younger Kelly, unfold as if guided along by Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Past, with Kelly sometimes speaking aloud, even though no one can hear him. These moments underline his lingering loneliness.

The film drifts through multiple cinematic moods as it traverses from L.A. to Paris to Tuscany. It's a risky move that produces tonal unevenness, with some sections far more engaging than others. The beginning resembles a sunbaked L.A. satire of failed actors, cult directors, and smarmy, sunglassed therapists (Josh Hamilton plays Jessica's). An unexpected  train ride to Paris, packed with the most whimsical assortment of characters imaginable, has the tone of a fizzy, madcap French comedy, complete with religious, Christ-complex iconography. The Tuscany stretch, featuring a perfectly-cast Stacy Keach as Kelly's father, nears the spinning atmosphere of Fellini (Jay Kelly sometimes reminds one of its more rigorous influences like Robert Altman's The Player, Fellini's 8 1/2 and Bob Fosse's showbiz fever nightmare All That Jazz).

With the exception of its killer, ironic final sequence, the comedy in Jay Kelly often feels strained. An unfunny gag about cheesecake runs throughout. And despite Sandler's genuinely affecting turn, his broadly-played scenes with his daughter and a distracting, miscast Greta Gerwig as his wife, designer sunglasses perched upon her head, feel unnecessary and undercooked (would his character be more mysterious if these scenes had been cut?).

The crafts, however, sometimes save the film from slipping into the abyss. Nicholas Britell's beautiful score is a highlight, smoothing out the film's jagged shifts and erraticism. Lush and old fashioned, it features a string motif that recalls Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade." Linus Sandgren's cinematography is equally rich and exquisite.

In post-2020 especially, there is ongoing discourse about the death of movies and the movie star. Jay Kelly, financed by Netflix and arriving in a particularly sluggish Hollywood year, especially for that elusive, midbudget adult drama, stirs a languid longing. Can a film be both corny and so ravishing and elegant at once? Those overstuffed 1960s Hollywood musicals and Jay Kelly fit that bill. ***

-Jeffery Berg