The enduring controversies surrounding Hannah Arendt confirm Wittgenstein’s insight: to think what we are doing was, and remains, much easier said than done.
Does pop music matter really? Is it “only rock and roll” or “all we have”? 'Love for Sale' misses out on a key opportunity to explore the deep questions.
"Hell or High Water" breathes new life into familiar materials, dealing out anachronistic juxtapositions while de-romanticizing the iconic figures of the western.
Comedies with superficial characters aren’t necessarily bad, but ‘Café Society’ stays predictable. ‘Florence Foster Jenkins,’ however, makes room for pathos.
The writer Dan Burt discusses renouncing his U.S. citizenship, his law and writing career, and how he adjusted to Cambridge and English society from South Philly.
With its command of reverberant silences, its conveyance of past horror and ongoing pain, 'The Innocents' does what all good movies do: it lingers with you.
By the time Diego moved in, I was forty and Diego fifty, our marginal existences long established. We ranted about the torture regime he once fled. We danced tangos.
'Weiner' sets out to film Anthony Weiner’s unlikely political comeback, as he sought to put the disgrace behind him with a run for mayor of New York in 2013.
Muhammad Ali’s self-love was transferrable. He beat up his opponents and pick-pocketed their confidence but miraculously helped millions see fresh possibilities.
Award-winning novelist C. E. Morgan talks about "moral beauty," evil and empathy, and how landscape informs her work, including her latest, "The Sport of Kings."
Even the eagle is deep / into dailyness // acts as if safe, & is silly / during its courtship rituals // spends days / inspecting / impregnable building sites...
Two jazz trumpeters, now each the subject of a biopic taking its title from one of its hero’s hits: "Born to Be Blue" (Chet Baker) and "Miles Ahead" (Miles Davis).
The atmosphere of moral agony in Eye in the Sky reflects standard-issue Hollywood sentimentality. Politically, it offers Americans moral justification for drone war.
The "culture industry" testifies to the expansionist ambitions of the late capitalist system, which can now colonize fantasy and enjoyment as it once did countries.
Barry Crimmins is a funny, frightening man. His humor is so sharp it feels almost dangerous to laugh. There’s no telling when it could turn, or in what direction.
Everything about "Horace and Pete"—its seriocomic ambivalence, performance aesthetic, production values—seems calculated to knock viewers out of their comfort zone.
Writer-director László Nemes takes us into the Auschwitz death camp one day in late 1944. The camera immediately fastens on Saul Auslander and never lets go.
The changes of Vatican II and the turmoil of the civil-rights and anti-war movements made for heady days, and Sister Corita Kent’s art further exemplified the times.
Just in time to relieve the post-Oscar doldrums comes the reappearance of Orson Welles’s "Chimes at Midnight," the 1966 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.
"Downton Abbey" has been vivid, suspenseful, and often funny, but it has always remained a soap opera with pretentions, a show obsessed with the passage of time.
"War and Peace" is called the greatest novel ever written, but it’s like sticking a “Kick me” sign on the book. Readers can’t help wanting to take issue with it.
Michael Moore tours the social democracies of Europe, assembling a piecemeal progressive utopia and contrasting it with the bleakness on our side of the Atlantic.
Very few historical films have achieved this degree of physical verisimilitude. The bad news? Verisimilitude may be 'The Revenant'’s only great achievement.
To judge by the pilot, the TV version of "The Magicians" will be a fast-paced and workmanlike distillation of Lev Grossman’s enthralling and often moving trilogy.
