Critics At Large

“Ever since Adam, who has really gotten the meaning of this great allegory—the world?” – Herman Melville, 1851 “Any sufficiently advanced te...

“Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” – Dorothy Parker (among others). “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” – George Burns (on his deathbed). Hav...

Art censorship, especially in cases that did not involve printed books, also once again reveals the limitations and often fortui...

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, via PBS. Ken Burns ’s newest film, The U.S. and the Holocaust , is the most timely, dark, and pol...

Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman and Robert Pattinson as Batman in The Batman . (Photo: Jonathan Olley/Warner Bros.) In his 1957 architectonic study ...

from left: Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once . Theories of the multiverse go as far back to...

“By 'modernity,' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the so-called eternal and t...

Franz Kline, Untitled , New York, 1952.   “The cultural environment is merely the reflection of what is in us, and if the cultural environme...

 Germaine Greer and Norman Mailer in Town Bloody Hall (1979). Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s Town Bloody Hall (1979) is an unauthori...

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in Twilight (2008). I confess: I too used to shit freely on Twilight (2008) . What started changing my...

Chuck Samuels: Becoming Photography (Kerber Verlag, 2021).   “From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one pra...

left: Marina Tsvetaeva, 1925. (Photo: Roger Viollet); right: Nina Kossman (Photo: courtesy of American Pushkin Society) “A real translation ...

Simon Baron-Cohen, author of The Pattern Seekers . "Philosophers have long posited self-knowledge as a foundational necessity for a mor...

“There are quantities of human beings, but there are even more faces, for each person has several.” – Rainer Maria Rilke Everybody has one –...

Invocation Democracy , a virtual exhibition Curated by Monet Clark for Pro Arts Commons in Oakland California. October 30, 2020 - January 20...

Critics At Large 's Deirdre Kelly wins the 2020 Nathan Cohen Award for Outstanding Review. (Photo:  McKenzie James) The Canadian Theatr...

“It was a trivializing, peripheral, silly sort of event, in the best uptown tradition,” Germaine Greer said in 2004 of the panel discussion ...

Tony Scott's Music for Zen Meditation . (Verve Records, 1964)   “We ought to listen to music or sit and practice breathing at the beginn...

Morgan Spector, Azhy Robertson, and Zoe Kazan in HBO's The Plot Against America . (Photo:Michele K. Short/HBO) It's about: W...

Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being...