At first, the TV show “Younger,” which premièred in 2015, seemed like it was going to be a Funfetti cake full of millennial jokes. It centers on the forty-year-old Liza Miller, a former publishing assistant who moved to the suburbs, Read More …
Every fifteen minutes or so, as I wrote this story, I moved my cursor northward to click on the disk in the Microsoft Word toolbar that indicates “Save.” This is a superstitious move, as my computer automatically saves my work Read More …
There’s an essay by Zadie Smith called “Dead Men Talking,” in which she suggests that every writer has an ideal reader. Smith, to her embarrassment, identifies herself as the ideal reader of E. M. Forster. “I would much prefer to Read More …
At the gas station, all the women looked like Melania Trump. It was uncanny. We’d just left Hungary by car, had crossed into Slovenia, and had stopped for gas and food. In Hungary, the women had broader faces, softer features. Read More …
“The King” is a stirring new documentary that addresses Elvis Presley’s complex cultural legacy and how it figures into our readings of the American Dream—it’s a movie about frontiers, and what it means to charge toward one. It chiefly stars Read More …
A series of coincidences recently brought to my mind a critic whose work I hadn’t read in decades but whom I consider one of the greatest and most enduringly useful film critics I’ve ever read: Harry Alan Potamkin, who was Read More …
Organic to the era of news-media consumption that it chronicles, “The Fourth Estate,” Showtime’s just completed, four-part series about the New York Times’ coverage of the Trump Presidency, is a painfully agitating document. In this second draft of history, when Read More …
On a recent cloudy afternoon in Rome, two young priests from Ireland, dressed in simple tab collars and black pants, stood with their noses pressed against the display window of Ditta Annibale Gammarelli, purveyors of ecclesiastical clothing and tailors to Read More …
The best new movie this weekend isn’t playing this weekend and isn’t really new—it’s the restoration of Jan Oxenberg’s 1992 documentary “Thank You and Good Night,” at Museum of the Moving Image next Tuesday, with the filmmaker herself on hand Read More …
Like many uncompromising, creative women, the funk-rock diva Betty Davis is often called a pioneer. The term is a tribute, of course, a way of defining her legacy in terms of the inroads that she made for later artists. Certainly Read More …