Download a transcript.Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter.2024 in ReviewNew Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.This year, high-profile failures abounded. Take, for example, Francis...
The two most daring and accomplished American movies of the year are also, at first glance, the most dissimilar. RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” stunningly drawn from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, sustains a rigorous first-person perspective—toggling between...
I had my worst-ever packing experience in the late nineties, when I was a teen-ager. My mother and I were returning from a trip to Ireland. Before leaving home, we’d overpacked extravagantly, imagining a wide range of non-rainy...
Rental House, by Weike Wang (Riverhead). Filled with both the comedy and the bitterness of miscommunication, this pointed, deadpan novel examines an intercultural couple’s marriage. Keru is a first-generation Chinese American; Nate is the product of working-class Appalachia....
Music critics—myself included—have spent much of the past several years bemoaning the decline of capital-“E” Events in music: no new superstars to crown, no more tentpole albums to unify us, no more hits that can hold our attention...
Taken together, three recent films provoke a profound questioning of how and why we guard the border walls separating documentaries from dramatic features. These movies sabotage genre purity; the modes which are supposed to stay apart—as a matter...
Richard BrodyStaff writerThe Criterion Channel, the foremost moveable source for art-house and repertory cinema, thrillingly expands its offerings each month, and has vigorously embraced a wide range of movies, spotlighting rare independent films and movies from around the...
In 2010, a private-equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management, which is named for the three-headed dog that is said to guard the underworld, bought six Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts and christened the chain Steward Health Care. The state’s...
So—a few weeks ago, I saw Kenneth Branagh in “King Lear” at the Shed. Maybe you did, too? It’s been a while, but I’ve been hesitating to write: I’m still processing. Branagh is certainly meant to be the...
For the past two decades or so, cinema’s loss has been television’s gain. As the mid-budget movie, once the natural home of grown-up fare, collapsed, prestige programming ballooned on the small screen. You probably know what happened next:...
