Style
“Hamnet” Feels Elemental, but Is It Just Highly Effective Grief Porn?
Zhao’s first three features were steeped in documentary realism, shot with a sturdy, windswept lyricism and abounding in nonprofessional actors. Then came her fourth picture, the clunky Marvel comic-book...
“Wicked: For Good” Is Very, Very Bad
As part of an anti-Wicked Witch of the West smear campaign, Morrible tries to ensnare the loyalties of Elphaba’s closest ex-classmates: Glinda, a smiling yet conflicted mascot for the...
The Ghosts of Girlhoods Past in “Sound of Falling”
Decades later, in the eighties, we meet Erika’s niece Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), a bespectacled, dark-haired teen-ager, growing up in what is now the German Democratic Republic. She casts longing...
The World-Shifting Grooves of Fela Kuti
The rest of Fela’s story is largely a cat-and-mouse game, and then an outright battle, between art and the state, Fela and the authorities. One of the series’ great...
“This World of Tomorrow” and “Oedipus” Dramatize the Power of the Past
To write “Tomorrow,” Hanks and Glossman adapted several of Hanks’s own short stories, primarily “The Past Is Important to Us,” which he had long hoped might become a movie....
What We Talk About When We Talk About Dignity
When the Albanian political philosopher Lea Ypi was growing up, her grandmother, Leman Ypi, would tell her that during her honeymoon—which took place in Italy in 1941, when war...
The Man Who Helped Make the American Literary Canon
In the nineteen-thirties and forties, young book critics on the make used to crowd outside the office of Malcolm Cowley, the literary editor of The New Republic, in the...
A Holiday Gift Guide: The Newest, Strangest Gadgets and Apps
We are entering a Surrealist phase of personal technology. Any device you might imagine can be found online courtesy of an obscure Chinese factory, ready to be shipped out...
Lives in Upheaval After an Eviction, in “Last Days on Lake Trinity”
In March, 2022, the people living in Lakeside Park Estates mobile-home park, in Hollywood, Florida, learned that they were being evicted. The park’s owner, Trinity Broadcasting Network, had decided...
