- Patricia Marx: Couch surfing the world.
8220;This is the last thing you want to hear when you’re couch surfing,” said my host, Cortney Fielding, a thirty-year-old freelance writer, when I arrived, this winter, at her one-bedroom apartment in the Nob Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. “Couch surfing” . . ....
- Wyatt Mason: Adam Johnson’s novel of North Korea, “The Orphan Master’s Son.”
Late in Adam Johnson’s second novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son” (Random House), a husband and wife sit down to dinner in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang with their little son and daughter. The children are telling stories. The son mentions a laborer who . . . (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: 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 Greenman: Shirley Brown’s “Woman to Woman”: Review.
paragraph class="noindent">The soul vocalist Shirley Brown was discovered by Albert King in the early sixties, when she was a teen-ager singing at the Harlem Club in Brooklyn, Illinois. After a decade touring with King, Brown finally made her début as a solo artist with “ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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 . . ....
- John Lahr: Terence Rattigan’s “Man and Boy” review.
For the nearly two decades between his first hit, “French Without Tears” (1936), and his 1954 play “Separate Tables,” Terence Rattigan was the West End’s most successful playwright: according to Geoffrey Wansell’s 1995 biography, two of his plays ran for more than . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: “Gilgul.”
8220;You know,” she said almost shyly, “that I have the ability, if you wish, to look into your eyes and tell you when you will die?”
“No, I didn’t realize you could do that.” He hesitated for a moment. “And I . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Source Code” and “Meek’s Cutoff.”
8220;Source Code,” a techno-thriller about a dead man who tries to save Chicago from nuclear destruction, is much more enjoyable than “Inception,” “The Adjustment Bureau,” “Limitless,” and other fantastical jaunts of recent seasons. The movie may begin as a sci-fi . . . (Subscription required.)...
- George Saunders: “Escape from Spiderhead.”
8220;Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.
“What’s in it?” I said.
“Hilarious,” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak™ whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.
I said out . . ....
- David Denby: “True Grit,” “The Company Men,” “Somewhere,” and “The Tempest.”
In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers’ enjoyably astringent remake of the maudlin John Wayne Western from 1969, the characters all speak in formal diction. They abjure contractions (typical sentence: “He has abandoned me to a congress of louts”), and they avoid the fanciful, “fuck . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “True Grit,” “The Company Men,” “Somewhere,” and “The Tempest.”
In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers’ enjoyably astringent remake of the maudlin John Wayne Western from 1969, the characters all speak in formal diction. They abjure contractions (typical sentence: “He has abandoned me to a congress of louts”), and they avoid the fanciful, “fuck . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Francis Spufford’s “Red Plenty,” review.
The first sign that this is not an orthodox history is the “cast” list up front, in which real people mingle with fictional ones. This hybrid approach, Spufford argues, befits the “fairytale” nature of his subject: the Soviet Union’s attempt—via a centralized . . . (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 . . ....
- Hilton Als: Diane Keaton’s “Then Again.”
Part of what makes Diane Keaton’s memoir, “Then Again,” truly amazing is that she does away with the star’s “me” and replaces it with a daughter’s “I.” Writing in a collaboration of sorts with her late mother, Dorothy . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Mike Peed: “Edi & the Wolf,” in the East Village.
paragraph class="noindent">At this new Austrian tavern, wedged into an increasingly companionable stretch of Alphabet City, “Edi” is pronounced “Eddie” and “the Wolf” does not refer to Harvey Keitel’s character in “Pulp Fiction.” These are the nicknames of the . . ....
- Emily Nussbaum: “Parenthood,” “Husbands” reviews.
There’s a popular theory that the mark of a great TV show is that it dares you to reject it. The most ambitious dramas repel their audiences (“The Sopranos”) or confuse them (“The Wire”) or give them nightmares about bodies dissolving in acid (“ . . ....
- Books: “William Golding.”
Carey’s thorough and illuminating biography, the first of Golding, also serves as a crucial introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s output. Golding’s novels, which include “The Inheritors,” “Pincher Martin,” and “Darkness Visible,” have always stood in the . . ....
- Books: Geoff Dyer’s “Zona” review.
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film “Zona” (better known in English as “Stalker”), an outlaw-cum-shaman known as Stalker escorts two men, named Writer and Professor, through an uncanny, Chernobyl-like Zone in order to reach The Room, where innermost wishes are supposedly granted . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: “Marley,” “Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope” reviews.
The good news about “Marley” is that it’s a documentary about Bob Marley, rather than, say, a creaking new adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” or another Jennifer Aniston comedy about a dog. Kevin Macdonald’s film runs for almost two and a half . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “Sons of the Prophet” and “Relatively Speaking” reviews.
8220;Ravishing” is the best word for Stephen Karam’s new comedy “Sons of the Prophet” (elegantly directed by Peter DuBois, at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels). At once deep, deft, and beautifully made, “Sons of the Prophet” stares unflinchingly at the Gorgon . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “All’s Well That Ends Well” and “Measure for Measure”
8220;The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,” one of the courtiers in “All’s Well That Ends Well” says in a piece of throwaway brilliance that reveals Shakespeare’s argument and his theatrical game. The ever-changing . . . (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: Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” review.
Winterson’s memoir relays the lesson, learned early, that a mother is “labyrinth-like and vengeful.” Her birth mother abandoned her; her adoptive mother chided, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.” A harrowing childhood followed: nights locked out of the house, a three . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” review.
Winterson’s memoir relays the lesson, learned early, that a mother is “labyrinth-like and vengeful.” Her birth mother abandoned her; her adoptive mother chided, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.” A harrowing childhood followed: nights locked out of the house, a three . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hilton Als: “Early Plays” by Eugene O’Neill, “CQ/CX,” “Rx” reviews.
The director Richard Maxwell’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Early Plays” (at St. Ann’s Warehouse) has the supreme realism of a dream. It is happening, and sometimes you don’t want it to happen, but you’re powerless to . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: Vincente Minnelli’s “The Band Wagon” review.
8220;The Band Wagon,” which screens on Sept. 30 in BAM’s complete Vincente Minnelli retrospective, came out in 1953. That was twenty years after “Flying Down to Rio,” in which Fred Astaire had streaked across the sky, and his role in Minnelli’ . . . (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.)...
