John Semley's posts

Born Neil Andrew Megson in Manchester, U.K., Genesis P-Orridge played an indispensible role in shaping the history…

When Citizen Gangster originally premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011, it went by the…

Care to match our obsessiveness? The first reader to correctly name the song order of our snare solo supercut will…

The cast of Whose Line Is It Anyway? was kind of like The Beatles, or any pop culture sensation: easy to…

It isn’t backhanded praise to say Phillippe Falardeau’s greatest skill lies in his ability to direct child actors.…

1. “Electrocuting An Elephant” (1903)
This list is meant not as a grim catalog of animal abuse for its own sake, but…

1. It’s The Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown (1974)
Easter is a holiday oddly bereft of pop-cultural artifacts. An…

The latest by Canadian director Michael Dowse (Fubar, It’s All Gone Pete Tong), Goon may seem patterned off Rudy or R…

1. “Hermanos” (Spanish, “brothers”): Arrested Development/Breaking Bad
Pop music has a longstanding tradition of…

Since 1985, singer-songwriter-guitarist David Gedge has served as the only consistent member of The Wedding Present.…

Warning: Every one of the entries below contains spoilers, generally including ending spoilers. In fact, even…

1. Angela’s Ashes
All of the (alcohol-enhanced) merriment and tacky apparel/tchotchkes that accompany St. Patrick’s…

If you like the Melvins, and are wealthy, now you can own a piece of sludge rock history. It recently came to our…

Imagine if the kind of documentary films that avow a complex relationship to the truth were fact-checked. Imagine if …

Last November, the four original members of Black Sabbath announced that they were working on a new record with…

Robert Bresson 101
The films of Robert Bresson are daunting, no doubt. His standing as one of cinema’s “patron…

1. Black Beauty (1877)
Usually, “everything is connected” stories center on a single uniting event, a chain of…

You can tell just by looking at Theophilus London that he’s a pretty enigmatic dude. The 24-year-old Brooklyn MC can…

If there’s a defining image of Leonard Cohen’s career, it’s the cover of his 1968 debut Songs Of Leonard Cohen. He…

Ti West’s new haunted hotel saga, The Innkeepers, premiered last year at the Toronto Film Festival but won't make…