Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, March 24, 2023
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Once Upon a Time � in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino�s re-imagining of the Sharon Tate story, is among his best films. It is on a par with Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds, emotionally moving as well as intellectually hefty, and everything a black comedy should be: […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Argentina�s decade-long �dirty war� (1974�83) during which a right-wing military junta �disappeared� about 30,000 left-wing dissidents � that is, executed them without acknowledgement of their deaths � ended over 35 years ago. Yet Argentina�s outstanding contemporary filmmakers continue to revisit the dirty war. In 2009, […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank is now 94, which means he has been in the midst what he calls a natural disaster old age for at least fifteen years. Yet when he was 80, as Gerald Fox trailed him for Foxs 2005 documentary Leaving […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In the autobiographical film The Souvenir, writer-director Joanna Hogg�s fourth and latest feature and a gemlike crystallization of her seamless method, she uses Jean-Honor� Franogard�s eighteenth-century canvas of the same title to set the terms of the budding relationship between Julie, the film�s ingenuous protagonist, […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Claire Denis� stupefyingly smart film High Life, the first she has directed in English, starts ahead of its main events, without any set-piece exposition, in and around a barren spacecraft inhabited by a father, his baby daughter, and zippered corpses that used to compose the […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck�s film Never Look Away concerns a German painter named Kurt Barnert (the charismatic Tom Schilling), but it is an unabashed interpretation of Gerhard Richter�s life. Its style is seductively elegant and its script at once discursive and oblique � qualities that […]
Contributed by Kristen Clevenson / The Price of Everything (2018), a documentary film directed by Nathaniel Kahn, seeks to assess the impact, influence, and inescapable role of money in the art world. In November, I attended a screening followed by a panel discussion featuring Pulitzer prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz, Hunter College professor […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / While watching At Eternity�s Gate, Julian Schnabel�s new film about Vincent Van Gogh, I wondered if Schnabel had made the paintings and drawings himself, and it turns out he did. “When Willem [Dafoe as Van Gogh] is drawing, sometimes my arm is in one sleeve of his shirt�luckily […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / �One man�s insanity is another man�s genius,� Joyce Carol Oates has written. In the popular imagination, though, Vincent Van Gogh was a psychologically tortured idiot-savant. Inner demons, not conscious deliberation, drove him to make his transcendent paintings, which invested natural phenomena with haunting emotional qualities […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Trump�s reactionary public policy, which has institutionalized contempt for the advances in social justice forged in the United States over the past 150 years, has produced pervasive discontent. Anger about his racism, misogyny, and homophobia is manifesting itself through art in different ways. In tone, resistance ranges from […]
Two Coats Obituaries