Critics At Large

Handmade sonic instrument used in Lance Austin Olsen’s sound environment. Lost Foundry/Fukushima Rising : a collaborative site-specific inst...

Cassie Beck in What the Constitution Means to Me . (Photo: Joan Marcus) In my American Drama class, when we turn from the golden age of Broa...

Yair Ben-Dor, Molly Ranson and Francis Benhamou in Prayer for the French Republic . (Photo: Sara Krulwich) Prayer for the French Republic ,...

Vincent D'Onofrio as Bob Howard in The Whole Wide World (1996). As Bob Howard, the pulp writer who romances a small-town schoolteacher ...

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

Alexander Bello and Trevor Jackson in The Tap Dance Kid . (Photo: Joan Marcus) The return of the Encores! series to City Center over the w...

Jack O'Connell and Stephen Graham in The North Water . Set in the 1860s on an English whaling ship that meets disaster in Arctic waters,...

Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog , currently streaming on Netflix. Reading the rapturous reviews of The Power of the Dog is a ...

Patti LuPone and Katrina Lenk in Company . (Photo: Matthew Murphy) There’s something undeniably poignant about seeing a Sondheim musical abo...

Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe in Belfast . Watching the black-and-white trailers for Belfast , Kenneth Branagh ’s fictionalized memoir o...

Yoko Ono; Paul McCartney.              Yoko One, "Death of Samantha,"  Approximately Infinite Universe , 1973. The Firemen,  Stra...

Jessie Buckley in The Lost Daughter . When first-rate actors turn into directors, one thing you can usually count on is the quality of the p...

Cate Blanchett and Bradley Cooper in Nightmare Alley . William Lindsay Gresham’s tough, darkly lyrical 1946 novel Nightmare Alley moves from...

(University of Chicago Press) “Objects have the longest memories of all. Beneath their stillness, they are alive with all the terrors they h...

David Alvarez Ariana DeBose in West Side Story (2021). The enthusiasm over Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story , the street-gang r...

Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem in Being the Ricardos . I’ve always thought that you can’t predict when the talented, wildly erratic Nicole...

Harold Rosenberg: A Critic‘s Life by Debra Bricker Balken was published by University of Chicago Press in October. “At a certain moment the...

Kathleen Rea in Five Angels on the Steps . (Photo: David Hou) Toronto indie dancer Kathleen Rea has put her life – the good bits and the no...

Ahmad Maksoud, David Hyde Pierce and ensemble in The Visitor . (Photo: Joan Marcus) Tom McCarthy’s 2007 film The Visitor is focused on Walt...

Sadie Sink and Dylan O'Brien in All Too Well: The Short Film (2021), directed by Taylor Swift. That’s right – despite its name, All Too...