What to Watch in April 2022: The Best Music Movies, Shows, and Videos

01.04.2022

Rosalía’s epic TikTok live performance is as innovative as her new album

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Celebrating the release of her inventive new record MOTOMAMI, Rosalía delivered a 28-minute live TikTok performance that brought her brazen sounds and visual theatrics to the small screen. Best viewed on a smartphone, the video uses simulated screenshots and TikTok’s duet feature alongside changing screen orientations to create an engulfing, VR-like effect. On opener “SAOKO,” the camera sits inside a motorcycle helmet facing Rosalía as she sings, before it suddenly gets thrown into the air and becomes more selfie-like. For “HENTAI,” Rosalía uses various camera angles and costuming to energetically switch between intimate POV moments and swirling cinematic sweeps, just like MOTOMAMI whiplashes between ballads and experimental reggaeton. Between breaking the fourth wall, playing in dirt, and riding around in scooters, Rosalía sets another new bar for music-video creativity. –Gio Santiago

Prison documentary Bring Down the Walls turns house music into a tool for activism, education, and freedom

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This Monday, Criterion Channel will premiere Bring Down the Walls, a 2020 documentary that confronts the U.S. prison industrial complex head-on, with a soundtrack of jubilant house music. Alongside artists, activists, and formerly incarcerated people, the British director Phil Collins (not that one) transformed a former firehouse in downtown New York into a space that offered talks and workshops on social justice and prison abolition with exuberant concerts at night made for and by Black, Latinx, and queer people. The film showcases the parties with kinetic splendor just as frequently as it explores the ripple effects of the carceral state on various lives throughout the city. Bring Down the Walls shows the closely intertwined relationship between music and social justice as it follows people who are trying to find freedom amid an unjust system. –Eric Torres

Watch: Criterion Channel (available April 4)

Sudan Archives transforms a furniture emporium into a denim dance hall

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Sudan Archives is the moniker of violinist and singer Brittney Parks, who loops and rearranges exquisite string arrangements into rhythmic, dance-ready shapes. Parks released the strutting new single “Home Maker” last month to usher in a new era, with a video that finds her flaunting acrylic nails and a tight denim outfit while prowling… an everyday furniture emporium, complete with aggressive fluorescent lighting and beige sofas. The store’s staticky security cameras capture her assured movements, as men start popping up and eyeing her from behind desks and bookshelves, just before they all break into gyrating choreo in worship of Parks, resplendent at the center. It’s proof that sometimes all you need for a memorable music video is an oddly familiar set, strong dancing, and a luminous personality commanding the camera. –Eric Torres

The Dropout’s early-2000s soundtrack is a bizarre delight

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The Dropout is a harrowing, occasionally hilarious vehicle for an excellent Amanda Seyfried, who plays Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes as she grifts her way through Silicon Valley via bogus health tech and wire fraud. The show spans from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s with era-appropriate needle drops to mark the passage of time, usually during scenes in which Holmes awkwardly jams out alone with her iPod to Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Missy Elliott, and other inspired choices. One particular sync in episode five captures the miniseries’ low-key brilliance: In an effort to win back the good graces of her partner Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), Holmes starts blasting Lil Wayne’s “How to Love” while sauntering into his office, clumsily shaking her hips and lip-syncing along with a green juice in hand. Holmes’ eclectic music taste may be the biggest stretch of The Dropout, but it’s a refreshing, cringeworthy wrinkle that makes one of the weirdest people on the planet seem just a little more down-to-earth. –Eric Torres

Watch: Hulu

Florence and the Machine cast a spell with three Dance Fever videos

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Florence Welch has spent the past decade-plus building up her resume as the witchiest arena rocker since Stevie Nicks. In the trilogy of videos heralding the release of her forthcoming fifth album Dance Fever, she finally embraces her destiny as a full-on coven leader. Directed by Autumn de Wilde, with choreography by Ryan Heffington and costumes by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, the clips for “King,” “Heaven Is Here,” and “My Love” depict Florence and her dancers as vessels of unbridled pagan femininity—stomping, wailing, flailing, flashing their undergarments, and generally whipping themselves into a murderous frenzy. It’s awesome. Unfortunately, the videos have taken on an undertone of unintentional sadness in recent weeks: They were filmed in Kyiv in November, and two of the dancers “are currently sheltering,” Florence revealed upon the release of “Heaven Is Here.” “To my brave and beautiful sisters Maryne and Anastasiia,” she wrote in the video’s YouTube description. “I love you. I wish I could put my arms around you. Strength.” She encourages fans to support the International Rescue Committee’s Ukraine response. –Amy Phillips

Immerse yourself in Thurston Moore’s despondent score for James Mangold’s 1995 debut film Heavy

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Long before he was the Academy Award-nominated director behind films like Girl, Interrupted and Ford v Ferrari, James Mangold was studying for his MFA at Columbia University’s film school while developing his first feature film, Heavy. Released in 1995, it’s a moody mumblecore drama that’s nothing like the rest of Mangold’s catalog. It follows Victor, an overweight thirtysomething cook, played by the eminent character actor Pruitt Taylor Vince, as he runs out the clock at his family’s greasy spoon. When the restaurant hires a demure college dropout named Callie (Liv Tyler) to wait tables, Victor immediately falls for her but finds himself paralyzed by self-doubt, disliked by her stuck-up musician boyfriend Jeff (Evan Dando), and teased by the cynical longtime waitress Delores (Debbie Harry). Heavy could easily come across like an ode to the rural incel, but a despondent, minimalist score by Thurston Moore steers the movie in a different direction.

Hanging over the entire film are distant drone passages, dreary guitar strums, and out-of-tune piano notes that ooze static misery. It’s a haunting combination that does all the talking for the otherwise silent Victor. Heavy is a quiet film that captures what it’s like to be hopelessly in love with someone, but more importantly, Moore’s score captures the unrelenting loneliness of life as a townie, where every path ahead seems like a dead end. –Nina Corcoran

Watch: Netflix

Better Things lets that motherfucker burn

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Currently in the middle of its fifth and final season, Pamela Adlon’s gorgeously lived-in dramedy Better Things continues to host the most ranging and bespoke soundtrack on television. The semi-autobiographical show, which follows Adlon’s character Sam and her three daughters as they bicker, joke, and grow up under the Southern California sun, is allergic to anything obvious or overly sentimental, and its music follows suit. Each half-hour episode is packed with songs, and they’re often so particular that you just know Adlon, an avowed music fanatic, had a hand in picking them herself, probably after a lot of internal deliberation. The season premiere alone includes everything from a little-known blues ditty from the ’60s to a lilting French tune that Wes Anderson wishes he found to Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song.” But the episode’s most surprising, and surprisingly effective, sync comes at the end.

After a beloved family statue falls from its perch at the top of the stairs and shatters into pieces, some folky guitar chords start to chime. Then, a deadpan voice: “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire…” That’s right. It’s motherfucking “Fire Water Burn,” the supremely dumb, supremely ’90s white-boy rock-rap anthem courtesy of one-hit jackasses Bloodhound Gang. (Wisely, the song’s verses, including lines like “I’m kind of like Han Solo, always stroking my own wookie,” are edited out.) This song has been largely forgotten for many legitimate reasons, but—somehow, someway—it works as an ominous final note here, suggesting plenty of embarrassing growing pains and lovingly scorched-earth fights to come. –Ryan Dombal

Watch: Hulu

Atlanta returns with a cutting blend of horror, comedy, and cultural critique

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As Alphone Pierre wrote in his recent review of Atlanta’s season 3 premiere: My favorite part of the premiere is when Darius and Van stumble into a cult-like residence, where there’s a man on his deathbed. After glancing at the guy, Darius (who is extremely high) thinks it’s none other than Tupac Shakur. Of course, shit goes left. They witness a shocking suffocation of “Tupac” that brings to mind the Scandinavian-set horror hit Midsommar, capped off with a goofy sync of Pac’s eternal “Hail Mary.” The startling moment is fucked-up, and funny as hell. Black horror at its best, alongside a perfect soundtrack.

Watch: Hulu

HBO’s Somebody Somewhere is a star turn for cabaret hellraiser Bridget Everett

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As Eric Torres wrote in his recent Listening Diary with Bridget Everett: Bridget Everett first started turning heads and dropping jaws in New York City around the turn of the century, when she would commandeer a Manhattan pub’s karaoke night, standing barefoot on the bar and belting out classics like “Piece of My Heart.” These over-the-top performances led to her finding cult fame as a star of the downtown alt-cabaret scene, where her joyously raunchy shows usually ended with her motorboating audience members and hosing them down with booze.

In Everett’s semi-autobiographical HBO dramedy Somebody Somewhere, her alter-ego Sam is more likely to make a quietly cutting joke than uncork a tipsy song while riding some guy’s face. But the show’s occasional musical moments reveal something profound about its main character. The first time Sam unleashes her robust mezzo-soprano, it’s in a church refashioned into an after-hours performance space by a new friend, who urges her to take the spotlight. She slowly works her way through a piano-backed cover of, yes, “Piece of My Heart,” eventually gathering up confidence and ripping her shirt open at the song’s climax.

Watch: HBO Max