In Oliver Hermanus’s new film, “The History of Sound,” two young men at the New England Conservatory of Music meet in a bar, when one of them (Josh O’Connor) plays a folk song the other (Paul Mescal) instantly...
This summer, I reread the novel “Aurora,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, a science-fiction writer whom I profiled a few years ago. Robinson has an ecological orientation, and “Aurora” is basically a book about how we fit into nature....
In Agnès Varda’s film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly forty-year-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown hair pinned back, sits in front of the Eiffel...
Bong (the name comes from a Khmer term of kinship and respect) is run by the Cambodian chef Chakriya Un, who was born in a Thai refugee camp and grew up in the U.S., and her partner, Alexander...
There’s little worse than watching a nervous actor onstage—especially when the poor guy isn’t just skittish but seems genuinely unprepared for the role that he’s playing. Incompetence has a way of unnerving its witnesses. An insecure performer robs...
In “The History of Sound,” a new romantic drama set during and after the First World War, passion is an intensely private thing, and in more ways than you might expect. Love and desire are not simply expressed...
In the past year, the actor Mark Hamill—best known for playing Luke Skywalker in the original “Star Wars” trilogy—has starred in not one but two adaptations of works by Stephen King: “The Life of Chuck” (2024) and “The...
I live in a three-generation household. My wife and I, our son and daughter, and my in-laws share a single house in the Long Island suburbs. Our place is big, but crowded: all of us have hobbies, and...
When the news is especially distressing, it can be easy to feel like art is futile; that you should, instead, focus your attention on all the suffering in the world, such as the cruelties inflicted by the second...
