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

04.02.2022

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché gives a punk icon her flowers

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As the leader of the iconoclastic punk group X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene blazed an inimitable path in the late ’70s, becoming one of the few women of color to pioneer the nascent UK scene. In this documentary co-directed by Styrene’s daughter Celeste Bell, which hits the iTunes Store this week, Poly is given her overdue flowers through an intimate crash course of her life, with voiceover commentary from members of X-Ray Spex, Neneh Cherry, Kathleen Hanna, and many more. Spanning kinetic, one-of-a-kind live footage of “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” during X-Ray Spex’s early years to frank descriptions of Poly’s struggles with mental illness at the height of the band’s fame, I Am a Cliché offers a candid look at a staunchly anti-authoritarian artist who was always at odds with an industry eager to commodify her. –Eric Torres

Rent/Buy: iTunes

The impromptu A Tribe Called Quest rap in Station Eleven is a beacon of hope amid the apocalypse

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In Netflix’s new stop-motion anthology film The House, Jarvis Cocker assumes the form of a mouse realtor trying to sell a bug-infested abode. It’s the role he was born to play. Rendered in painstaking miniature, director Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s segment is a pitch-black comedy about obsession and the denial of animal nature. It’s also a straight-up horror flick for insectophobes. The Pulp frontman’s character, credited as “the Developer,” flips a run-down two-story into a tacky bachelor pad, only for a hoard of roaches and some creepy prospective buyers to ruin his handiwork overnight. Highlights include Cocker and Gustavo Santaolalla’s original song for the film, the Developer’s tiny cargo shorts, and a synchronized musical dance number… performed by bugs. –Madison Bloom

Stream: Netflix

Toro y Moi’s eye-popping homage to the postal service will make you want to buy a lot of stamps

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“Postman,” the first single from Toro y Moi’s upcoming album Mahal, is a laid-back slice of funk-pop with a delightful video to match. The clip highlights Toro’s heritage, as he drives around in a Filipino Jeepney collecting friends and inexplicably bursts out of a balikbayan box stranded on a beach. Apart from the joyride, the clip spotlights the postal service with unabashed, slightly unhinged love: Don’t miss the inventive use of hundreds of stamps, plus a hallucinatory CGI sequence that lends some antic, dazzlingly weird theatrics. –Eric Torres

You’ve never seen anything quite like Titane’s transgressive firetruck dance

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In director Julia Ducournau’s 2021 Palme d’Or winner Titane, Agathe Rousselle plays a (literally) autophilic car show dancer-cum-serial killer named Alexia, dripping gore and motor oil as she flees from the authorities. Disguising herself as a runaway boy named Adrien, she forges an unexpectedly tender bond with the real Adrien’s steroid-addicted fireman father—all while trying to hide her pregnancy. When rowdy, drunken firefighters force Alexia-as-Adrien to join in on their macho dance party, we watch old habits die hard: With Lisa Abbott’s crooning cover of “Wayfaring Stranger” in the background, she begins to gyrate atop the fire truck as she once did at those car shows, long before her bloodthirst landed her in trouble. And when her “father” walks in, as stunned and confused as the firemen watching, she doesn’t stop. It’s a scene where humor gives way to emotional charge; Alexia’s femininity, perceived as disgusting and dangerous, is both her strength and her undoing. Still, she kills it (no pun intended) on that fire truck: eyes closed, hips fluid, transgressively gorgeous in her refusal to back down. –Sue Park

Rent/Buy: Amazon | Apple | Google Play

Watch Olivia Colman sing “Livin’ on a Prayer” with her whole body in The Lost Daughter

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The two most haunting scenes in The Lost Daughter, the excellent recent adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel, arrive back-to-back about 20 minutes before the film’s tense close. First, a worm crawls out of a plastic doll’s mouth, leaving a warning sign and a curdled feeling that hangs in the air for Colman’s Leda. Later, in the seaside Greece town where she’s vacationing, she stumbles upon an outdoor nightclub and is drawn in by the loose-limbed innkeeper (Ed Harris). The look of joy on Colman’s face as she watches other people dance is one thing, but there is a 30-second stretch of pure magic: one of the greatest actors of our time going full “oh shit, that’s my song” to Lord Jon Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” She belts the first verse to herself, tipsy, eyes closed, arms up, sweat starting to show. I don’t even want to know if Olivia Colman is a Bon Jovi fan, it’ll just ruin it. –Jillian Mapes

Stream: Netflix

Find solace in the best song from Encanto (no, not that one)

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If you have spent any amount of time with a child under the age of 10 at any point in the past month, chances are you have been unable to escape the grip of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Encanto soundtrack. Even if you haven’t seen Disney’s latest animated juggernaut (and I highly recommend that you do, because it is delightful and completely free of toxic Disney-ness), you probably have at least been confronted by a kid singing, dancing, and acting along to “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” currently the No. 1 song in the country.

But “Bruno” isn’t the best song on the Encanto soundtrack. That would be “Surface Pressure,” a reggaeton-inflected banger written by Miranda and co-produced by Mike Elizondo, who has worked on everything from “In Da Club” and “The Real Slim Shady” to Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine to the most recent Turnstile album. As sung by actress Jessica Darrow as the preternaturally strong older sister Luisa, it’s a cry for help set to a gorgeously animated fantasy sequence involving a herd of donkeys, the sinking of the Titanic, and Hercules fighting Cerberus. As sung by me and every other parent desperate to keep their family safe, entertained, and under some semblance of normalcy during the omicron surge, it’s a primal scream from the depths of despair. Everybody, now! “Pressure like a drip, drip, drip that’ll never stop, whoa! Pressure that’ll tip, tip, tip till you just go pop, whoa!” –Amy Phillips

Stream: Disney+

Cheat on Afropop prodigy Ayra Starr, and she just might bury you alive

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Around the turn of the century, Nigeria’s film industry, dubbed Nollywood, started to explode, churning out hundreds of movies a year. Most of them were done quickly and cheaply, filled with pulpy storylines about cannibalism, witchcraft, and murder. The promising young Lagos singer Ayra Starr nods to this era with her video for the fed-up ballad, “Beggie Beggie,” featuring fellow Nigerian upstart Ckay, off her brilliant debut from last year, 19 & Dangerous. Her sequined butterfly top and bright red braids call back to early-2000s style, and while there’s no witchcraft on display here, Starr does end up tying a rope around a cheating dude’s neck and dragging him across a lengthy patch of dirt. That’s not the only vivid expression of her exasperation. Whether she’s throwing a glass bottle at a DJ’s skull or burying a guy in the ground up to his chest, one thing is clear: Play with Ayra Starr’s heart at your own discretion. –Ryan Dombal

Eric André steals the show as a guitar solo-loving preacher in megachurch sendup The Righteous Gemstones

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The first season of HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones came through with one of the most memorable songs of 2019 with “Misbehavin’,” a bouncy number about “runnin’ through the house with a pickle in my mouth” that had real staying power. Admittedly, season two of the irreverent comedy from Danny McBride has yet to deliver such a singular hit. But it does have Eric André grandstanding as a charismatic megachurch preacher named Lyle Lissons who loves guitar solos about as much as he loves Jesus and money. Elsewhere, Joe Jonas makes a surprising appearance as himself, and country star Jennifer Nettles returns to the fold as Aimee-Leigh Gemstone in flashback scenes, flexing her acting abilities to impressive ends as the beloved late pillar of the family. With all this musical firepower, another unlikely hit seems inevitable. –Allison Hussey

Stream: HBO Max

Red Rocket breathes new life into *NSYNC’s eternal “Bye Bye Bye”

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The Earth is groaning under the sheer amount of needlessly dramatic piano covers of pop songs that tease out their dark undertones as if that wasn’t what made the song great in the first place. Suzanna Son’s slowed-n-teary version of *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” might initially come off like more chum for the movie-trailer industry, but inside of Sean Baker’s latest film, the deliriously entertaining Red Rocket (available to rent next week), the actress and singer performs the song in character in her bedroom for Mikey Sabre, a porn star, groomer, and male manipulator extraordinaire played by Simon Rex. It’s a moment that reveals the impressionable 17-year-old to be much more than who Mikey thinks she is. And to Baker’s great credit, he also uses *NSYNC’s original “Bye Bye Bye” (along with an eerily reversed version), so that the only music you hear in this movie about a sudden and unwelcome homecoming is a song about wishing someone would simply just leave. –Jeremy D. Larson

Rent: Amazon | Apple | Google Play

Janet Jackson pulls back the curtain on a legend

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As Tarisai Ngangura wrote in her recent review: Lifetime’s four-part series Janet Jackson—which has sparked a resurgence of appreciation posts and analysis on the legend’s social and cultural impact—is a masterclass on the singer’s balancing act between restraint and disclosure. What is the etiquette of sharing your hardships when wealth insulates you from the worst of the world’s social ills, yet your problems are truly just like everyone else’s? It’s a catch-22 that Jackson, having been in the public eye since age 7, knows intimately.

Stream: Lifetime

The Yellowjackets soundtrack gets ’90s angst insanely right

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As Quinn Moreland wrote in her interview with the duo behind Yellowjackets’ music: On the instant cult classic Showtime series Yellowjackets, which just wrapped its first season, high school trauma devolves into a surreal horror show. The year is 1996. A plane carrying a girls soccer team crashes into the remote Canadian wilderness, leaving the survivors stranded for 19 months. The psychological warfare of adolescence slowly, painfully gives way to madness and then… cannibalism. Much of the show’s aesthetic pulls spiritually from, and nods to, the 1990s: the casting of alternative “it” girls of the era, Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci (in a total reinvention), as grown-up survivors Natalie and Misty; the way Hole, PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Belly needle-drops just feel right, or how the characters keep their sanity by getting down to a cassette of Montell Jordan’s high-school dance staple “This Is How We Do It.” The opening credits even make VHS static feel edgy again.

Stream: Showtime