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Criterion Channel’s Thrillingly Evolving Roster
Richard BrodyStaff writerThe Criterion Channel, the foremost moveable source for art-house and repertory cinema, thrillingly expands its offerings each month, and has vigorously embraced a wide range of movies,...
Family Discord and Holiday Music in “Cult of Love” and “No President”
The first image of Leslye Headland’s family drama,“Cult of Love,” on Broadway at the Hayes, looks like a Christmas card. Behind a gauzy scrim, most members of the ten-person...
The Gilded Age of Medicine Is Here
In 2010, a private-equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management, which is named for the three-headed dog that is said to guard the underworld, bought six Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts...
Paul Schrader’s Favorite Works of Fiction
Paul Schrader, whose latest film, “Oh, Canada,” is based on Russell Banks’s semi-autobiographical novel “Foregone,” is no stranger to literary adaptations. In 1985, he co-wrote and directed “Mishima: A...
Nikki Giovanni’s Legacy of Black Love
Nikki Giovanni died this week, at the age of eighty-one, as that rarest of things: a best-selling poet. Her work burst onto the scene in the nineteen-sixties already fully...
Remembering Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean Heyday (and Forgetting His Recent Lear)
So—a few weeks ago, I saw Kenneth Branagh in “King Lear” at the Shed. Maybe you did, too? It’s been a while, but I’ve been hesitating to write: I’m...
The Best TV Shows of 2024
For the past two decades or so, cinema’s loss has been television’s gain. As the mid-budget movie, once the natural home of grown-up fare, collapsed, prestige programming ballooned on...
The Hollow Allure of Spotify Wrapped
I joined Spotify, the Swedish streaming service, toward the end of 2020, spending the better part of a Sunday transferring my Apple Music library and local files onto the...
Kendrick Lamar’s Year on Top
The film “Paid in Full,” from 2002, is a fictionalized retelling of the brief but titanic reign of three real-life New York drug kingpins during the crack era of...
Paul Valéry Would Prefer Not To
One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of...
