The new movie “Annihilation” feels like a vanity project in a very specific way: until a few strikingly inspired moments near the end, it plays like a film made for no personal need, no sense of inquiry or effort to Read More …
This is a piece that wrote and unwrote itself in Google Docs. It wrote itself as a reported article, in which I spoke to friends and colleagues about their mixed experiences with the free word-processing program. In some tidy corner Read More …
Tuesday was a soft evening in San Francisco: the fog intensified to something like a mist, and then a drizzle, and, up on the thirty-fifth floor of a sleek condo building on Tehama Street, guests in sharkskin suits and evening Read More …
The voice mail was from my mother’s longtime stockbroker, in the private-client department at Charles Schwab. “We’ve had some requests for large cash withdrawals from her account,” she said, and asked me to call her back. “We’re afraid that maybe Read More …
One evening earlier this week, I stepped into an unremarkable building, just north of Union Square, on my way to do something that I felt was equal parts stupid and funny. As a person who enjoys working a joke into Read More …
I recently watched, in a single sitting, the entire first season of “Girls Incarcerated: Young and Locked Up,” which premièred on Netflix, last month. It follows, in eight episodes, about fifteen inmates, referred to as “students,” at Madison Juvenile Correctional Read More …
There’s a retrospective of the actor Michel Piccoli taking place at Film Forum right now, and another, of the director Agnès Varda, that will alight at Museum of the Moving Image this weekend, but the movie in which the twain Read More …
It has taken more than a year for “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?,” Travis Wilkerson’s great documentary of mourning and reckoning, to reach general audiences—it premièred at Sundance in January, 2017, and opens at Film Forum on Wednesday. Read More …
The academics have a word for it: “commensality.” It describes the practice that determines who eats with whom at the table—who has a place, who doesn’t have a place, and how, instinctively and traditionally, the rules and rituals of sharing Read More …
The prologue to “Cobra Kai,” on YouTube Red, reiterates the climax of its esteemed predecessor, “The Karate Kid,” from 1984. At the All-Valley Karate Tournament, limping Daniel LaRusso delivers a championship-winning crane kick to the head of his vicious opponent, Read More …