Critics At Large

Lauren Cuthbertson and Federico Bonelli in the Royal Opera House's 2017 production of  Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wond...

George Segal in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). When George Segal died at eighty-seven on March 23, most people would have recogniz...

Our erstwhile safari guide in 1954, appearing to contemplate checking out of the mortal hotel after being honoured with a Nobel Prize. (John...

Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Coyne in French Exit . The Canadian novelist Patrick deWitt evades categories. I encountered his second book, T...

Naomie Vogt-Roby and Maxime Bachellerie in Damien Manivel’s The Park ( Le parc , 2016). Damien Manivel’s The Park ( Le parc , 2016), co-wr...

Mike Nichols directs Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966). Mark Harris wrote two of my favorite contemporary books...

Theater of Cruelty , by Tana Oshima. “At first I thought my work was about desecration, but instead it became a more complex landscape of hu...

One of Laurie Anderson's paintings of Lolabelle. The avant-garde artist and composer Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog belongs in the spe...

Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel in News of the World . When movie lovers look for a studio-era comparison to Tom Hanks , the star who crops up m...

Julian Barbour is the author of The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time (Basic Books, 2020). “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know wh...

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman .  Promising Young Woman begins as a black comedy-horror picture about the revenge that Cassie ( Ca...

James Baldwin in Terence Dixon’s Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970). It’s been a year now since the pandemic officially began, ...

Andra Day in The United States vs. Billie Holiday . What is it about Billie Holiday that brings out the twenty-four-carat fakery in dramati...

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

Gérard Philipe and Micheline Presle in Devil in the Flesh (1947). If you ask movie fans to come up with a classic drama about a romance bet...

Magistrati show, 2016, Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary, Alberta. All the photographs in this piece are courtesy of Michael Davidson.   ...

Frances McDormand in Nomadland (2020). Fern (played by Frances McDormand ), the protagonist of Nomadland , loses her job and her home in a ...

Eric Stoltz and Penelope Ann Miller in Gregory Mosher's production of Our Town , 1989. I’ve been living with Our Town for more than ha...

Frank Zappa. (Photo: Roelof Kiers/Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures) I have been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa's music of late, everyth...

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