Swedish, the native language of the novelist Fredrik Backman, is spoken by only about ten million people, so the writer feels fortunate that all his books—including the best-sellers “A Man Called Ove,” “Anxious People,” and the “Beartown” trilogy—have...
If asked to come up with a quintessentially “human” work of art, one could do worse than to name a film by Studio Ghibli. The Japanese animation studio, founded by the legendary eighty-four-year-old director Hayao Miyazaki, is known...
My in-laws own a little two-bedroom beach bungalow. It’s part of a condo development that hasn’t changed much in fifty years. The units are connected by brick paths that wind through palm trees and tiki shelters to a...
“Precious Rubbish,” a début graphic novel by Kayla E., a book designer turned cartoonist, delivers an unflinching look at the author’s coming-of-age in a rural fundamentalist community in Texas. “Li’l Kayla,” who divides her time between her estranged...
Not everything at Crevette is effortless perfection. The Dover sole, a pricey fish that seems to be experiencing a renaissance in New York’s more high-end dining rooms, arrives traditionally dressed in capers and béarnaise, the body de-finned and...
There’s something that has always struck me as undeniably teen-age about loving the Doors, and particularly its lead singer, Jim Morrison. The rock group, which was active for only eight years, from 1965 until two years after Morrison’s...
Beguiling blends of fiction and nonfiction are the highlights of this year’s edition of the New Directors/New Films series, at Film at Lincoln Center and MOMA, April 2-13. “Fiume o Morte!” (April 4-5), by the Croatian filmmaker Igor...
The Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who died in 2015, at the age of a hundred and six, is the Benjamin Button of filmmaking, precocious in reverse. He made only two features before the age of sixty and...
At ninety-five years old, Catherine Kuehn became a world-record-holding powerlifter. “It’s been very easy for me,” she explains with a smile, “because no one my age was doing it.” “Strong Grandma,” the documentary short by Cecilia Brown and...
Most people who see the Zambian British director Rungano Nyoni’s extraordinary new film, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” will not be Zambian. Like Nyoni’s first feature, “I Am Not a Witch” (2017), it has played in film festivals,...
