Sam C. Mac

For both its earnest, uninhibited sense of play and impeccable pop, Painting With is a uniquely affecting album.

The album serves as a reminder that Williams’s best songs need not inhabit one specific place, geographically or emotionally.

It finds a benefit in its genre affiliation, evenly distributing its action in quick bursts of fluidly animated fight choreography.

Donnie Yen’s performance is so good that it’s a shame Wilson Yip’s films have never strived to be more than briskly entertaining hagiography.

The album has its share of big moments, but it’s mostly made up of small, claustrophobic gestures of prickly emotional uncertainty.

The film exists less as a meaningful extension of its world than as a fan-service deployment device.

Chi-Raq is a Spike Lee joint in the urgent sociopolitical register of Radio Raheem’s boombox—a call to arms that’s also a call to disarm.

Throughout, director Justin Kurzel’s stagey pretensions clash with each of his aesthetic choices.

Purpose arrives at the end of a half-cocked goodwill tour rife with transparently calculated displays of repentance.

The worst that can be said of Art Angels is that its maximalist ambitions sometimes overshoot the needs of pop.

The dancehall crooner shows a vested interest in the music scene that fostered his talents.

The album’s wildly uneven sprawl leaves this quixotic songwriter more susceptible to criticisms than ever before.

Pageant Material is a laidback, if melodically impeccable, set that makes subtle strides in developing Kacey Musgraves’s sound.

Everything Is 4 recalibrates a bit, updating Derulo’s sound to current trends with 11 precision-tooled three-minute-and-change pop songs.

I Can’t Imagine opts for uncharacteristically hazy sprawl over Shelby Lynne’s usual tight focus.

Passion Pit’s Kindred is mired in a sonically limited pop vocabulary.

Though it’s a return to form for the band, Kintsugi falters is in its sacrifice of momentum for structure.

Its evocative of a whole culture’s history, as expansive in its sonic repertoire as Lamar’s raps are unmoored from his specific realities.

The second half doesn’t always live up to the standard of poetic lyrics or dynamic pacing Moorer set on the best of her past releases.

True Romance is a personal body of work, an uncompromised expression of what defines Estelle as an artist.