Louise Bourgeois’s Art Can Still Enthrall

In recent years, Noche Flamenca, New York’s finest flamenco troupe, has been taking inspiration from the art of Francisco Goya. The company’s aesthetic of bare-bones authenticity and banked-fire passion matches the painter’s dark candor. Situations and moods from Goya prompt and color the troupe’s usual loose collections of ensemble numbers and solos for its excellent dancers (among them Jesús Helmo and Paula Bolaños) and its transcendent star, Soledad Barrio. The troupe’s latest program, “Irrationalities,” joins Goya with a touch of Fellini and Sophocles’ “Women of Trachis.” The ancient Greek playwright is another kindred spirit for Noche Flamenca, which presented a revelatory version of “Antigone” a decade ago.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; Jan. 27-Feb. 8.)

Movies

In his later years, in the nineteen-fifties, the director Max Ophüls, who fled his native Germany when Hitler took power, developed one of the most instantly recognizable—and one of the most sophisticated—cinematic styles, based on elaborate tracking shots jointly choreographed for camera and actors. Metrograph’s twelve-film retrospective of his work includes these mature masterworks (a highlight is the Maupassant adaptation “Le Plaisir”) and his Hollywood films of the forties (such as “Letter from an Unknown Woman”). The selections range back to the start of his career, in the nineteen-thirties, with such films as “The Company’s in Love”—a bittersweet inside-the-movie-business comedy (screening in a new remastering) that he made in Germany, in 1932—and the dazzlingly inventive French romantic comedy “The Tender Enemy,” which is also a ghost story.—R.B. (Jan. 24-March 1.)

Pick Three

Rachel Syme on cultish happenings upstate.

Illustration by Doug Salati

1. Last year, I finally got a car—after living in New York City for twenty years without one—and one of the marvellous benefits is being able to spend more time exploring strange and mystical areas upstate. It is no surprise to me that the region, with its misty, mountainous terrain, has given rise to many oddball communities, both utopian and nefarious. I recently binged the new podcast “Allison After NXIVM,” a CBC show that features in-depth interviews with the actress Allison Mack, who did jail time for her involvement with the abusive upstate cult run by the con man Keith Raniere. The podcast is a fascinating artifact, the tale of a woman still untangling her role as both victim and victimizer.

2. On a less sinister note, I loved Mona Fastvold’s new film, “The Testament of Ann Lee,” so much that I saw it three times in a week. It tells the story of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), an illiterate Englishwoman who founded the American Shaker movement, from a commune called Niskayuna, on the Hudson River. It’s a gorgeous achievement—full of music, ecstatic dance, and true believers hollering in the woods.

3. I have continued down the Shaker rabbit hole since seeing the film, reading every book about the group that I can find. So far, my favorite is Chris Jennings’s “Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism,” from 2016, which charts the paths of five kooky dreamers who founded (often ill-fated) experimental communities in the American wilderness.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet: