Two individuals, each with plenty of issues and their own communication quirks, collide on opposite ends of a mental-health helpline in Jeremy Beiler’s short film “Happy to Help You.” Amy Sedaris plays Nora, who reluctantly calls in after...
In the first act of the wittiest Irish play of the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde’s “Importance of Being Earnest,” there is much ado about a shortage of food. The fearsome Aunt Augusta is coming to tea, but we...
A Matter of Complexion, by Tess Chakkalakal (St. Martin’s). Charles W. Chesnutt, the subject of this well-considered biography, was born to free people of color in 1858. He could have passed as white, but he identified as Black;...
Soon after Trump signed his Guantánamo directive, he ended Temporary Protected Status for more than three hundred thousand Venezuelans and half a million Haitians, making them eligible for deportation in the coming months. The Administration is considering other...
A warrior is in a prison cell. His guard approaches and shows him the wooden sword that he will receive once he has earned his freedom. The warrior grabs it, uses his unlocked cell door to knock the...
When we first meet Shula (Susan Chardy), the quietly unbending protagonist of “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” she is driving home from a fancy-dress party, wearing dark shades, a gleaming metal helmet, and a puffy black jumpsuit—it looks...
Film festivals are important showcases for films that don’t yet have distribution, but there’s a hitch in the process. What happens when a movie, after a première at a festival, hits a bottleneck of rejections at other festivals?...
Mary Ellen Matthews has been shooting the show’s hosts and musical guests in variously compromising positions for a quarter of a century. Finally, you can admire her work for more than three seconds.
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Any Oscars ceremony where most of the big prizes go to “Anora” and “The Brutalist”—two blazingly intelligent, vividly personal movies, both encouraging signs of an American independent cinema not yet in its long-anticipated death throes—is a very good...