My night at the Oscars ended on Melrose, around 1 A.M., teetering on a curb in the clean cold air of Los Angeles after a winter snap and a rainstorm, offering girlfriend-outside-the-club encouragement to the beloved actress in her fifties Read More …
I happened to listen to “This Is America,” the new single by Childish Gambino, a.k.a. Donald Glover, before I saw the eloquent, ultra-violent accompanying video concocted by Glover and the director Hiro Murai. One of the song’s three strands is Read More …
The Netflix documentary series “Wild Wild Country” recounts the saga of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a guru who rose to prominence in India in the nineteen-seventies, and collapsed into infamy in Oregon the decade after. Rajneesh’s followers (known as Rajneeshees) reject Read More …
Tom Wolfe, who died Monday, was—as even those of us who did not share his politics and often deplored his taste and even doubted the fashion wisdom of all the white suits have to admit—one of the central makers of Read More …
“Six Days of the Condor,” the 1974 novel by James Grady, was the basis for “Three Days of the Condor,” the 1975 film by Sydney Pollack, which, in turn, inspired the new series “Condor,” just “Condor” (airing Wednesdays, on Audience). Read More …
The playwright Tom Stoppard was in town recently, to see previews of his 1974 play, “Travesties.” The drama is set in Zurich in 1917; central to the action are James Joyce, the poet and Dada founder Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Read More …
The image appears before us like something out of a bad dream. He is seated behind the Resolute desk, his Chiclet teeth exposed in a rictus of extreme jollity. She is standing slightly behind him, considerably more sombre. In buttoned-up Read More …
When Quiara Alegría Hudes was growing up in Philadelphia, in the nineteen-eighties, her Puerto Rican mother would blast Afro-Caribbean tracks “every morning, volume eleven.” On weekends, she’d catch the bus to Manhattan to visit her aunt Linda, the composer and Read More …
Lynn Nottage’s riveting new play, “Mlima’s Tale,” opens on a moonlit savanna. Deep elephant calls rumble through the theatre. At center stage, an African man (Sahr Ngaujah) begins a soliloquy. “I was taught by my grandmother to listen to the Read More …
In his new film, “Unsane,” Steven Soderbergh has come close to the cinematic equivalent of Flaubert’s dream of “a book about nothing.” The subject of the film—a hectically intense thriller about a young woman named Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) who Read More …