In the recent TV adaptation of the classic Australian novel “My Brilliant Career,” from 1901, a childhood of running, swimming, and speaking freely in the bush comes to an abrupt end. Sybylla Melvyn (Philippa Northeast), the dreamy eldest...
This attention to dramatic framework is a logical extension of Swanberg’s prior body of work. All of his films are largely rooted in improvised performances—he creates stories, plots them out into scenes, and then grants the actors a...
The protagonists span generations, though McBride focusses on flawed men in their thirties and forties, much as Klay, Lefferts, and Conroe do. But where those authors have attempted to analyze masculinity through solemn, literary means, McBride’s lens is...
Yet the newly single woman—it’s almost always a woman writing a divorce book—is also prone to culinary epiphany. In many stories, the end of a marriage prompts the rapturous rediscovery of tastes, habits, carnal desires. Gillies recounts being...
My partner and I moved in together recently, and she was horrified to learn that I cook with bottled citrus juice—you know, the little plastic lemons and limes that are on the grocery shelf near the drink mixers....
The ingenious answer was proposed by an art-engineering firm called SMACH. The company’s experts realized that, if the tapestry could not be rotated and stored, perhaps it could be stored and then rotated. They designed an object that...
Na’s solution to this problem is speed: the faster he can keep his aliens moving—Va’migere, alas, is not alone—the less likely we are to scrutinize the malevolent jumble of pixels they are. The film’s first chase is a...
Performances alternated between two stages—Marigold and Dandelion—without overlap, in theory giving all forty-five thousand attendees a shot at laying eyes and/or ears on every set. In practice, this worked for a time. Walking at a motivated but not...
All four are manifestly bourgeois, flashing their cash from the moment they arrive at the village where they are to stay. They blusteringly order a bedraggled local man named Lakha to accompany and serve them. (“Ask if he...
