Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Cult film auteur Guillermo del Toro, director and co-writer of the triumphant The Shape of Water, sees 1962, in which […]
Tag: film
Art and film: Billboard as political provocation
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / During the pre-Mad Men golden age of roadside America, advertising billboards set a tone of warm and friendly commercialism. Perhaps […]
Art and Film: Ruben Ostlund’s bloated indignation
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The art world and the bourgeoisie are taking a cinematic beating this year. Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and […]
Art and Film: Noah Baumbach’s New York state of mind
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is arguably Noah Baumbach’s best movie since The Squid and the Whale, and seems sure to […]
Art and Film: Aronofsky�s Bosch-esque mother!
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Albert Oehlen is perhaps foremost among visual artists seeking to capture the jangled frenzy of the Internet Age, having done […]
Art and film: Kogonada and Modernism in “Columbus”
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Columbus is a serenely penetrating postmodern film, acted with realistic understatement and set in the eponymous city in Indiana — […]
Art and film: �Detroit� and Faulkner�s truth
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / William Faulkner famously said, �The past is never dead. It�s not even past.� That is a key truth about one […]
Film: A strategic retreat�s smirk of defiance in DUNKIRK
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson /In his paradoxically granular war epic Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan assumes viewers know that the British Army�s 1940 strategic retreat from the […]
Art and Film: Ghost as witness
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / George Eliot said, wisely, that our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them. For the great […]
Art and Film: Not so simple folk (art)
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / According to Aisling Walsh�s irrepressibly winning Maudie (2016), Maud Dowley, plagued by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, was through no fault of […]
Art and Film: The life and death of a cinephilic boomtown
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A somewhat film-nerdy set of historical facts gave rise to found-footage maven Bill Morrison�s extraordinarily artful and expansive documentary Dawson […]
Art and Film: Wajda�s final word on art and politics
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson /�Wladyslaw Strzeminski, the reluctant hero of Afterimage, the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda�s last film before his death at age 90 […]
Art and Film: Stefan Zweig and the artist�s abdication
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If poet Pablo Neruda weaponized his talent and his plight to stand against authoritarian forces in his native Chile and […]
Art and Film: Elizabeth Murray and the splendor of the ordinary
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Elizabeth Murray, who died too young at 66 in 2007, stretched and contorted household scenes and objects into kinetic abstract […]
Art and Film: Pablo Neruda and the triumph of art
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / With Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, the principled advancement of civilization as the goal of politics seemed to […]
Art and Film: Damien Chazelle comes of age in La La Land
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson /�Whiplash, Damien Chazelle�s remarkably assured and incendiary second feature from 2014, made the case that artistic accomplishment was predominantly a cloistered […]
Art and Film: Kelly Reichardt�s stoic women
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Kelly Reichardt�s unostentatiously virtuosic Certain Women, based on Maile Meloy�s short stories, depicts hardscrabble Montana in angular austerity, with the […]
Art and film: Bruce Conner, escape artist
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Evident in the transfixing Bruce Conner retrospective �Bruce Conner: It�s All True� at MoMA is a probing eye that seeks […]
Art and film: Growing up at 70 Hester Street with Thomas Nozkowski and Joyce Robins
Contributed by Casimir Nozkowski / I grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a building that was once a synagogue, a whiskey […]
Art and Film: Ira Sachs on art and growing up
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Ira Sachs makes sensitive movies about contemporary urban life that are distinguished by their grand refusal to present stock characters […]
