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...
“Paradise,” on Hulu, is a political thriller with a vintage feel. Surely Hollywood’s obsession with the Presidency has produced this kind of drama before? There is the handsome white Commander-in-Chief, President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), shuttled to the...
The expansive machinery of loss contains many moving parts, interconnected tragedies that occasionally become interconnected blessings. There is the tragedy and blessing of time, which opens up to the tragedy and blessing of memory. I find myself wandering...
The first moments of Samuel D. Hunter’s new play, “Grangeville,” now at the Signature, take place in the pitch dark. Out of the blackness, a man’s voice—nasal, strongly Midwestern, a little plaintive—asks what seems like a silly question: “Is...
In 2003, he shot Stone’s biography of Alexander the Great—a multi-continental epic in which he captured Alexander’s near-death in battle using infrared film, tinging the scene with bloody hues. His next film was radically different: “Brokeback Mountain,” Ang...
“Gandhi’s Scant Garb Bars Audience with Pope.” So read the headline of a New York Times report, from December 13, 1931, that the Vatican had cancelled a meeting between Pius XI and “the Indian nationalist leader” because the...
Minnie Mouse and Orpheus meet at a singles mixer on an ocean liner, en route from New Zealand to England. Orpheus, who is really a man named Toby Withers wearing a game nametag, has never heard of his...
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, in 2020, and the cultural upheavals that ensued, classical-music organizations began including more composers of color in their programs. The Philadelphia Orchestra recorded the symphonies of the early-twentieth-century Black...
Lee opened Sunn’s in partnership with the wine maven Grant Reynolds, of Parcelle, who oversees the quite excellent wine program; as befits such a petite restaurant, the list is small but mighty, and by-the-glass options are limited to...
Back in 2021, I wrote an essay about the great musicians who, surprisingly, had performed at my high school, in Kansas City, in the nineteen-sixties: the Crystals, the Drifters, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Ike & Tina Turner....
