- Anthony Lane: “In a Better World” and “Super.”
The winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, “In a Better World,” is a tale of two countries. One is Denmark, the native land of Susanne Bier, the movie’s director. The other is an African state, and it is there that . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: Busby Berkeley’s “The Gang’s All Here.”
It’s no surprise that Busby Berkeley’s most visually eruptive musical, “The Gang’s All Here” (playing at Film Forum April 20-26), is a wartime movie (it was released in 1943). Although it’s Berkeley’s first color film, its opening is . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Thinking, Fast and Slow” review.
In this engaging investigation of the “systematic errors in the thinking of normal people,” Kahneman gently interrogates the reader with questions from his career as a research psychologist, leading us along to his own rather dismaying conclusions about human rationality: we misunderstand the present and learn the wrong . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Cookbook Collector.”
Goodman’s charming reworking of “Sense and Sensibility” follows two sisters—Emily, the C.E.O. of a promising data-storage startup in Silicon Valley, in the late-nineties, and Jess, a tree-hugging vegan who meanders through graduate school at Berkeley while moonlighting at an antiquarian bookstore . . ....
- Richard Brody: Blake Edwards’s “Wild Rovers.”
paragraph class="noindent">The urbane director Blake Edwards (who died last December, at the age of eighty-eight), best remembered for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Victor/Victoria,” and the Pink Panther comedies, was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Los Angeles. In his only . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: Busby Berkeley’s “For Me and My Gal”
Busby Berkeley’s name is synonymous with his kaleidoscopic production numbers, but his 1942 musical, “For Me and My Gal”—which has no scenes in his signature style—holds a rightful place in his career. He tailored his methods to his galvanic stars: Judy Garland . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.
In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Voodoo Histories.”
Aaronovitch’s survey of conspiracy theories has a sense of humor about its subject, but only up to a point. If there is anyone he disapproves of more than, say, 9/11 Truthers or believers in the murder of Princess Diana (or of Marilyn Monroe or Vince Foster), it is . . ....
- Books: “The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris.”
To disguise his Algerian heritage and land a job at a French bank, the narrator of this tragicomic novel has whitened his skin, straightened his hair, and legally changed his name—in short, declared “an ethnic war against himself.” Once a devout Muslim, he is now bent . . ....
- Books: “From the Land of the Moon.”
This spare, fable-like novella tells the story of three generations of a Sardinian family, centering on an eccentric woman, referred to simply as “grandmother,” who, in the years following the Second World War, pursues a brief but enthralling affair with a disfigured veteran before returning to her . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: On the Horizon
MOVIES
ROMAN EMPIRE
Sept. 7-30
The acclaim that Roman Polanski received for his first feature, “Knife in the Water,” which he made in his native Poland, launched him into a long career that has included such classics as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” . . ....
- Books: “Young Romantics.”
Hay examines the “turbulent communal existence” of the English Romantic poets, astutely parsing the intricate circumstances that led to this network’s distinctive creative output; she shows, for instance, that “Frankenstein” emerged not merely out of fireside “conversations about ghosts and galvanism” but . . ....
- Books: Victor Cha’s “The Impossible State” review.
8220;Industrialized,” “urbanized,” and “high tech” are not words one typically associates with North Korea. Yet, in the wake of the Second World War, as China and the U.S.S.R. vied for influence in the Korean peninsula, it was just that. Since then, political paranoia, economic . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben McGrath: A historian fact-checks “Boardwalk Empire.”
In Atlantic City last summer, Bryant Simon, a Temple University history professor, was ticketed for running a red light—on foot. “I think you can get a ticket for anything here,” he said the other day. “This is notoriously a shakedown town.” Simon, who grew . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “Robin Hood.”
What do you get if you mix “Gladiator,” “The Return of Martin Guerre,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Elizabeth,” “Troy,” “The Seventh Seal,” and a hundred buckets of mud? The answer is “Robin Hood”—the latest version . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->BOOKCOURT
Mark Kurlansky, the author of “Cod,” “Salt,” and “The Big Oyster,” among many other books, discusses his latest release, “World Without Fish,” an illustrated assessment of the future of the oceans. (163 Court St., Brooklyn. 718-875-3677. April 20 at . . ....
- Books: “The Enchanter.”
Zanganeh writes a love letter to literature and to Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who has charmed her with his “demonic artistry of words” and with the “joyousness of pure knowledge.” Zanganeh, once a reluctant reader, picks up “Ada, or Ardor” and quickly discovers that . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “James Madison.”
One of only two delegates to attend every session of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Madison transcribed the deliberations. He decided to publish this “most exact account” posthumously, reasoning that “the distance of time like that of space” lends to everything an “attractive” lustre. In . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Hari Kunzru’s “Gods Without Men” review.
The most compelling character in this densely populated novel is Jaz, the mutinous, vacillating American-born son of Sikh immigrants, who is unable to shake a sense of his “peasant” ancestry despite marriage to a Jewish intellectual and a job on Wall Street. At work, he toils on . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Hari Kunzru’s “Gods Without Men” review.
The most compelling character in this densely populated novel is Jaz, the mutinous, vacillating American-born son of Sikh immigrants, who is unable to shake a sense of his “peasant” ancestry despite marriage to a Jewish intellectual and a job on Wall Street. At work, he toils on . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Feeding on Dreams” review.
This latest memoir by the Chilean-American author and former Allende adviser resumes the tale of his countless “dislocations” since fleeing Chile, in 1973. Dorfman shuttles among three continents and two languages, adrift in “an eternal victimhood of regret.” The resulting “wrath” may help . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “A Reader on Reading.”
Lectures, columns, and other occasional writings are gathered here to form a meditation on “the art of reading.” Thoughtful interrogations of the value of identity labels like “Jewish fiction” or “gay fiction” and the relationship between writers and editors mix with ruminations on the . . ....
- Books: “The Girl with Glass Feet.”
In this wintry fable, Ida Maclaird finds her feet crystallizing into glass, and she travels to the archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land in search of an enigmatic hermit who she believes can cure her. St. Hauda’s, “a wilderness of recluses,” hides miniature moth-winged . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “Clash of the Titans” and “Everyone Else.”
There is an awful lot of clashing in “Clash of the Titans,” but no Titans. A pity, for the real Titans were early-model deities, born of Uranus and Gaea; she, peeved by her husband, took the unusual step of forging what one ancient text describes as “ . . ....
- Books: “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.”
Abandoned by his wife and rebuffed by his estranged father, a middle-aged salesman named Maxwell Sim—“like a SIM card”—finds he has “lost all appetite” for “human contact.” Leaving behind seventy Facebook friends and the fake e-mail address he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: “The Future,” “Another Earth,” and “Cowboys & Aliens.”
To call a movie “The Future” is, if you think about it, inspired. In any city where the film is playing, people will say to one another, “Have you seen ‘The Future’? ” If the title is doomed to cause misunderstanding, that is part of . . ....
