- David Denby: Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” review.
Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” is, of all things, a portrait of a soul. The movie is a nuanced account of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a sympathetic monster, a compound of intelligence, repression, and misery—a man whose inner turmoil, tamed and sharpened, irrupts . . ....
- Goings on About Town: On the Horizon
MOVIES
TATTERED SCREEN
Aug. 12-20
The seventies director William Lustig programs a set of movies at Anthology Film Archives, including Larry Cohen’s “The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover,” Henri Verneuil’s “The Burglars,” and Jonathan Kaplan’s “White Line Fever . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “I Am Love.”
The best sex you will get all year, if that’s what you crave in your moviegoing, is between Tilda Swinton and a prawn. In the middle of “I Am Love,” a succulent new film from the Italian director Luca Guadagnino, Swinton’s character, Emma Recchi . . ....
- Books: “The Outlaw Album” review.
In this collection’s twelve stories, Woodrell expands upon the unremittingly bleak portrait of Ozark life drawn in his novel “Winter’s Bone” and in the acclaimed film based on it. In one, a young woman tends to a rapist who was brain-damaged when she . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Cassidy: Goldman Sachs and Wall Street reform.
Few things excite the public as much as a financial scandal. When the scandal involves Goldman Sachs, the richest, most powerful firm on Wall Street, and the central figure is an unknown thirty-one-year-old Frenchman who refers to himself as Fabulous Fab, the result is a barrage of . . ....
- David Denby: “Crazy, Stupid, Love” and “Friends with Benefits.”
For the current Vanity Fair cover, the young actress Emma Stone has been outfitted as an overgrown Lolita—bikini, blond hair, flaming-red lips. But in “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” a genial, messy comedy of marital discord and mismatched lovers, Stone has auburn hair and a slightly downturned . . ....
- 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: “The Secret History of Costaguana,”
8220;All Colombians are liars,” the narrator of this turbulent novel declares. He is, of course, Colombian, as is the author, who aims at a corrective to the fictionalized portrait of Colombia in Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo.” Vacillating between polemic and farce, Vásquez presents . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Francisco Goldman: Néstor Kirchner, Grupo Clarín, and the adoptees of Argentina’s Dirty War.
On November 24, 1976, eight months after a military junta took power in Argentina, launching the Dirty War that introduced the term los desaparecidos—“the disappeared”—to the world, a house in a peaceful, tree-lined neighborhood of La Plata, about forty miles southeast of Buenos . . . (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.)...
- Peter Schjeldahl: Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait,” at the Frick.
Is the Frick’s Rembrandt “Self-Portrait” of 1658 the best painting in New York? Its return from a revelatory cleaning coincides with a fine show, “Rembrandt and His School: Masterworks from the Frick and Lugt Collections.” Bankrupt by the age of fifty-two, the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Revolutionaries.”
8220;I wish there was a War,” Alexander Hamilton wrote, in 1769, while in his teens. But, as Rakove’s wide-ranging and nuanced group portrait of the Founding Fathers shows, few of them shared such a wish so early, no matter how much they bristled at England . . ....
- Books: “Everything.”
Canty’s fourth novel chronicles a year’s worth of turmoil in the lives of five appealingly aimless Montanans. Layla, a bright college student, and her heavy-drinking father, RL, fall into parallel adulterous romances—she with Edgar, a promising young painter, he with Betsy, an ex . . ....
- 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.)...
- Books: “Mr g” review.
A note at the end of this concise but ambitious novel about God’s, or Mr g’s, creation of life, the universe, and everything else assures the reader that its narrative adheres to “the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology.” Lightman . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “God’s Arbiters” review.
From 1898 to 1902, the United States was mired in the Philippines in a guerrilla war so heated it turned Mark Twain into an anti-imperialist and inspired Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden.” Those in favor of annexing the island nation championed the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Toby Lester’s “Da Vinci’s Ghost” review.
This short, engaging book provides historical and intellectual contexts for one of the world’s most famous drawings, Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man,” in which a male figure is inscribed in both a circle and a square. Lester traces the conceptual origins of the drawing back to . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Joyce Carol Oates’s “Mudwoman” review.
Because M. R. Neukirchen, the protagonist of Oates’s powerful novel, is a philosopher who plumbs “the perimeters of ‘knowing,’ ” it is no surprise that the book often misleads and confounds. At a young age, M.R. was abandoned by her Christian-fanatic mother in a . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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.)...
- 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.)...
- Books: “The Betrayal” review.
The effects of repression replace those of deprivation in this sequel to Dunmore’s “The Siege,” which was set during the long siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. It’s now 1952, and Anna and Andrei have made a happy life for themselves and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Quickening.”
In Hoover’s début, the quiet struggle between two Midwestern farm women has the stark simplicity of a Biblical parable. After the First World War, stoic, industrious Enidina Current and her husband draw life from the hard earth of their fields, but at home Enidina suffers violent . . ....
- Books: “What He’s Poised to Do.”
Infidelity and romantic disconnection pervade the fourteen stories in this brisk book, which ranges from a tale of familial dissolution on a lunar colony in 1989 to a factory that manufactures Karmic Boomerangs in a place called Australindia. Greenman, an editor at this magazine, conjures an infatuated man in 1940 . . ....
- Books: “Haiti” review.
8220;There are tons of idiots who have never used their ten fingers for anything, and who wander around constantly repeating, inanely: ‘Haitians are very lazy,’ ” the Haitian writer Louis-Joseph Janvier wrote in 1882, in a long and passionate rejoinder to his nation’s critics . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Natalie Dykstra’s “Clover Adams” review.
Born in 1843 to a wealthy, intellectual Boston family, Marian (Clover) Hooper moved in the most illustrious circles of nineteenth-century America. Henry James called her “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats”; Henry Adams married her. In Washington, she became a celebrated hostess, rode horses, and, at the age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Joan Acocella: The Bolshoi Ballet’s “Don Quixote” on video, at IFC.
Most “Don Quixote” ballets are pretty stupid, and the Bolshoi version, remotely descended from the 1869 original, is stupider than most. The plot, which has little to do with the man of La Mancha, is often incomprehensible, and when you can understand it, you wish you couldn’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “John Carter,” “The Deep Blue Sea” reviews.
The season of quarter-billion-dollar movies has kicked off with a mess. Andrew Stanton’s “John Carter,” based on an ancient novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs (written at about the same time as “Tarzan”), begins with a battle on Mars, or Barsoom, as Burroughs . . . (Subscription required.)...
