Matthew Connor

Courtesy of the artist

Brian Eno is back with another ambient record. Called Reflection, it's due out Jan. 1 on Warp Records and consists of a single, 54-minute track. While Eno isn't sharing any samples of Reflection for now, he says it's similar to his 1985 album Thursday Afternoon, a moody, meditative record that was one 60-minute track.

In a prepared statement, Eno describes Reflector as a "generative" work because the sounds "make themselves."

"My job as a composer is to set in place a group of sounds and phrases, and then some rules which decide what happens to them," Eno says. "I then set the whole system playing and see what it does, adjusting the sounds and the phrases and the rules until I get something I'm happy with. Because those rules are probabilistic (often taking the form 'perform operation x, y percent of the time') the piece unfolds differently every time it is activated. What you have here is a recording of one of those unfoldings."

Eno's description of this generative method for making music echoes how he originally described his first ambient album, Discreet Music, released in 1975. He later followed with similar records, including Ambient 1: Music For Airports and More Music For Films. Eno's most recent album, The Ship, included vocals and came out in April of this year.

Neighbors say we're causing a commotion… pic.twitter.com/IjHWPGr0pN

— Britney Spears (@britneyspears) October 25, 2016

The face you make when the rumors are true and you collabed with your idol & basically your whole life is a dream so you keep it cute for Brit but inside you are wigless and dead #slumberparty #ultimatestangoals #whatislife #reallyhappening #

A photo posted by TINASHE (@tinashenow) on Oct 25, 2016 at 3:00pm PDT

Three actors, three ages, one soul: Barry Jenkins’ beautiful, sensitive Moonlight tells a coming-of-age story in passages, each possessed of enough stand-alone power to operate as a wonderful short film, even as the whole proves much greater than the sum of the parts. After the time-lapse miracle of Boyhood, any movie hoping to credibly depict someone growing up on screen has its work cut out for it. But watching Chiron, the main character of Moonlight, change from a bullied 9-year-old boy (Alex R. Hibbert) to a gawky teenager (Ashton Sanders) to a quiet, muscular man (Trevante Rhodes), it’s easy to believe we’re seeing the same person throughout—the same shy and taciturn kid, uncomfortable in his own skin, living in his own head. The actors don’t look much alike, but they create a continuity of performance: a whole person in spectrum.

Chiron is poor, black, and gay ...

Immediately after (quite successfully) pivoting into original material with Don’t Breathe, director Fede Alvarez is going back to adapting other peoples’ work. This one isn’t a remake like Alvarez’ breakout film, 2013’s Evil Dead, though. No, this time Alvarez, presumably looking for a light, easy project, is venturing into a subgenre of action filmmaking that, historically, has come with little public scrutiny and low expectations from fans. That’s right, he’s making a comic-book movie.

He’s not being sucked up into the Marvel or DC cinematic machines, though. (Not yet, at least. Give it time.) Instead, Sony has hired him to direct an adaptation of crime-story specialists Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Incognito limited series, which was originally published by Marvel’s creator-owned Icon imprint back in 2008. Drawing from vintage pulp heroes like The Shadow and Doc Savage, Incognito follows the adventures of an ...

Little Sister star Addison Timlin is not an intimidating physical presence. In fact, standing next to her hulking co-star Keith Poulson, who plays her older brother, she seems like a little girl dressed in an oversized cardigan and button-up denim shirt. That image fits her character, Colleen, an ex-Goth in her early 20s who ran away from home to become a nun and has now returned to confront the dysfunction that made her flee in the first place. It fits the movie, too, a slight, sweetly cynical indie dramedy about family and belonging and the ways we cope with life’s disappointments.

As the opening quote from Marilyn Manson flashes onto the screen, one might expect Little Sister to lean a little too heavily on the quirky side of things. And director Zach Clark’s recurring trick of cutting in VHS-style home-video and news clips throughout occasionally does come across ...

One week a month, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: In honor of the new sequel to the modern classic The Blair Witch Project, we look back at some of our favorite found-footage horror films.

The Taking Of Deborah Logan (2014)

Horror often revels in death and decay. What it almost never does, however, is engage with these concepts as they exist for most of the population—that is to say, with the actual process of dying. In the case of The Taking Of Deborah Logan, a found-footager from 2014, the specific ailment afflicting the elderly namesake is Alzheimer’s, and its devastating effects are not sugar-coated or glossed over in the slightest. We all hope to live hale and hearty to a ripe old age, but the uncomfortable facts remain: If you’re lucky enough to live into your ...

Rob Zombie’s latest clown-based horror film, 31, has recently been released through on-demand services, and that—along with the coming fall season—has got people thinking about his 2007 Halloween remake. The film wasn’t especially well-received, but it made a ton of money primarily on the strength of the Michael Myers brand and how awesome Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” is. Appropriately, then, the changing of the season is also reminding people of a talk that horror icon and original Halloween director John Carpenter gave to the New York Film Academy back in April, in which he called Zombie a “piece of shit” and casually dismissed the remake.

This came during a Q&A section in which a woman asked Carpenter for his thoughts on the remake. He initially explained why remakes are so common these days (money, obviously), and noted that he was fine with the idea of a ...

She already helped to instill a (probably healthy) fear of attending dinner parties thrown by your weird ex in viewers of The Invitation, and now director Karyn Kusama is out to make people feel vaguely unsettled by children, too. That news comes courtesy of Variety, which reports that Kusama has signed on to direct a horror film called Breed for 20th Century Fox. Based on a novel by Chase Novak, Breed follows the general creepy-kid template set by Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen to tell the story of a wealthy Manhattan couple whose trip to an experimental Eastern European fertility clinic is successful—but at a cost. It’s not until 10 years after the procedure that the true consequences of the treatment become clear, however.

Kusama will reunite with her The Invitation co-writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi for the project. Breed is being produced by Out Of ...

Let’s be real, this probably hasn’t happened since 1995, but it’s time to get really excited about something Alicia Silverstone is doing. You see, the Silverstonaissance (Silverstone Age?) is nigh. According to Deadline, the erstwhile Cher Horowitz has been cast in the next film from The Lobster director Yorgos Lanthimos.

In the movie, which is amazingly titled The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, Silverstone will play the mother of a teen (Barry Keoghan) who turns “sinister.” Colin Farrell—who gave an oddly tender performance The Lobster— returns for this one as a surgeon who has to make what Deadline deems an “unthinkable sacrifice” because of the young man’s actions. Nicole Kidman is also on board as Farrell’s character’s wife. If Lanthimos’ previous work is any indication, it’s sure to be strangely humorous and surreally violent. A24 has already picked it up.

This is ...

Lionsgate recently unleashed its first TV spot for Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s Blair Witch Project sequel, hitting theaters this September.

Simply titled Blair Witch, the film features James Allen McCune as Heather Donahue’s brother, who’s obsessed with finding out what happened to his sister and her friends in the woods of Maryland in 1999. The new commercials take viewers back to the house where we last saw Mike propped up in the corner.

When it was revealed at Comic-Con that Wingard’s previously announced The Woods was in fact a Blair Witch sequel, fans had disparate opinions. While some folks were excited for a return to the Black Hills and vomit-inducing shaky-cam (particularly after Book Of Shadows), others were disappointed that Wingard and Barrett were making a franchise film. The duo’s previous films You ...

James McAvoy gets his United States Of Tara moment and it goes seriously wrong in the trailer for Split, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest. The movie stars McAvoy as Kevin, a dude with multiple personality disorder who kidnaps a trio of pretty teens. One of the young women is played by The Witch’s Anya Taylor-Joy, clearly looking to claim her scream queen crown. Betty Buckley provides some exposition here, playing a psychiatrist who explains that Kevin has 23 personalities. We meet some of them in this footage: There’s creepy abductor Kevin, stern British lady Kevin, and 9-year-old boy Kevin. More unsettling is talk of something called “The Beast,” accompanied by some monster-drawings.

Shyamalan might be on a roll after The Visit, which The A.V. Club deemed a “comeback.” If nothing else, Split at least looks like a delicious McAvoy performance. It will freak you out in theaters ...

Before the internet superhighway was jammed with “cam girls,” 1-900 numbers were the best way to take advantage of lonely men’s pocket books. While those numbers promising “stimulating conversation” advertised during the late-night second feature on USA Up All Night were strictly adults only, nobody wanted youngsters to feel left out of the premium-rate telephone game. Usually during syndicated weekday afternoon cartoons, commercials advertised the biggest stars of the day, just waiting to hear from you! Fans could dial up to hear (with parental permission of course) pre-recorded messages from such teen idols as The Coreys, Paula Abdul, Al Grandpa Munster, and number one ’80s heartthrob Freddy Krueger.

Yes, for $2 for the first minute and 45 cents for each additional minute, the man of your dreams would share his favorite “deadtime stories” with anyone brave enough to dial 1-900-909-FRED. What a perfect way to reach out and kill ...