Celebrating Community
It’s never “just a movie.” No matter the pedigree, quality, or budget, filmmakers use their medium not just to tell stories and entertain but to engage viewers in some kind of sociopolitical-economic commentary, regardless if it’s Steven Spielberg or Jane Campion or Roger Corman or Ed Wood behind the camera. And when some director deflects with “it’s just a movie,” […]
As October was here, the time had finally arrived. With the crisp and cool autumn air in my lungs, I set foot in a museum which, like much of the rest of New York’s art-loving public,I had eagerly awaited following its four-month, $450-million, and additional-47,000-square-foot makeover. Would New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, a seminal institution for the collection […]
Carmen Maria Machado is a queer writer who gained a widespread following from her experimental collection of eight short stories: Her Body & Other Parties; (2017) a finalist for the National Book Award. Machado’s debut is dark, playful and experimental. In “Especially Heinous,” Machado rewrites 300 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and in “The Husband Stitch,” Machado […]
Everyone knows the Mona Lisa. Some have seen the Mona Lisa from behind a rope after queuing up at the Louvre. Only few have gazed upon it up close. Now, due to technological advances, all can linger on extraordinary digital presentations of the Mona Lisa along with Leonard’s other paintings, drawings and sketches. We can see the cracks on the […]
Diego Maradonna, the new film from Academy Award-winning documentarian Asif Kapadia, opens with a car chase. Two sedans speed through the winding streets of Naples, enclosed on both sides by throngs of football fans. As they holler and push against police barricades,adoration becomes indistinguishable from aggression. The sedans accelerate to escape this mass of suffocating love, and they nearly collide. […]
The cheapest type of movie you can make is a movie that takes place on paper – that is, a novel. Cinema and prose fiction are different art forms with different strengths, but don’t tell that to Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995), the French crime novelist whose 1972 literary sensation Nada recently appeared in English for the first time, thanks to New […]