It's Not a Scoreboard

With the street-level chaos of Kids, the vibey nihilism of Spring Breakers and the analog grime of Trash Humpers, of course Harmony Korine's production shingle (skateboard company?) EDGLRD is behind Barrio Triste. A gang of disaffected teens steals a TV reporter's Betacam to document their lives in this abrasive, hypnotic plunge into 1980s Medellín — the breathtaking feature debut of Colombian-American photographer and longtime Bad Bunny video director STILLZ. As it veers from a stark neorealistic chronicle of poverty into something more spatially and narratively disorienting, the dreamlike dread escalates through Grammy nominee Arca's dissonant, avant-industrial score.

Ethiopian-American singer Kelela spent the last decade redefining R&B, blending electronic production, club rhythms and icy, Björk-like vocals into something both personal and conceptually curious. Her third album "new avatar" is a paradox: the most guitar-heavy rock-inflected record of her career, a distorted and grungy backing sound that is warmly comforting. Who'd have thought the D.C. raised Brooklynite, who formerly sang in a progressive alt-metal band, would end up with a simmering, supple duet like "outta time," in which A.K. Paul's expressive vocals channel the magnetism of Prince?

More than 50 filmmakers will be on-hand for the quarter-century edition of the New York Asian Film Festival (July 10-26), a grassroots operation that grew into a vital institution, introducing Noo Yawk crowds to legendary directors like Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook and Johnnie To before they were household names. Opening night spawns the North American premiere of South Korea's high-rise freakout Colony, a return to zombie cinema from Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), but there's a treasure trove of new and repertory pleasures too wide-ranging to encapsulate. (Don't sleep on Sundance breakout Filipiñana or the 4K restoration of rom-com landmark My Sassy Girl!)

It's Okay to Enjoy a Movie with Reservations. We've lost the ability to talk about cinema in anything but absolutes. Social media, texting shorthand, and the relentless churn of hot takes have flattened nuance. Everything is either a high masterpiece or the worst garbage, and if you don't understand a film? It must be the director's fault, not yours. This cultural impatience makes real conversation impossible, but a Black critic friend in Chicago put it better than I can. He doesn't believe in "cancelling" a film with problematic qualities, instead treating them like technical errors — a boom mic in the frame, a flubbed line. A casually racist or homophobic joke from 1982 might make you cringe, but that doesn't negate the film's merits. You can hold both ideas at once. That's what criticism used to be. Nobody is asking you to love everything, but we need to stop treating our personal discomfort as a definitive judgment. A film that fails in one way can still succeed in another. It's not a scoreboard, and who gets to define what's "good" or "bad"?