Debut Novel ‘Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You’ Brims with Menace
Ariel Delgado Dixon’s compulsively readable debut novel, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, explores what it means to cope with a shared, painful past.
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Black Sorcerers in the Trenches of David Diop’s ‘At Night All Blood Is Black’
David Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black is a terrifying fable whose haunting imagery explores the traumas of empire, colonial thought, and masculinity.
Marcial Gala’s ‘Call Me Cassandra’ Revolts Against Gender Constraints
In Call Me Cassandra, Marcial Gala dismantles the suffocating binary of unyielding machismo in pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba.
On Ireland’s Painful Emergence into the Modern World
Fintan O’Toole’s lucid history of Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves, is a vivid telling of how his country’s culture of silence and repression was broken open.
Laurie Anderson’s Big Science Is a Multifaceted Approach to the Artist and Her Art
Professor and music critic S. Alexander Reed takes an immersive approach to Laurie Anderson’s Big Science and writes as if he is in conversation with the artist.
Douglas Sirk’s ‘Written on the Wind’ Blows Away 1950s-Era Conventions
Douglas Sirk’s excellent and subversive drama, Written on the Wind, shows a rich family coming unglued, ungripped, unzipped.
Powell & Pressburger’s Radical and Ravishing ‘The Red Shoes’ Performs the Dark Side of Devotion
Powell & Pressburger’s film version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” asks, is Art worth dying for?
Film Posters in the Revolutionary Age of Soviet Cinema
Constructivism’s influence in Soviet-era film posters favored cubist-like aesthetics that turned to electrifying colors, shapes, and lines drawn not by laws of perspective but by rulers and compasses.
Alejandro Zambra’s ‘Chilean Poet’ Is a Tender Ode to Parents and Language
In ‘Chilean Poet’, Alejandro Zambra reaches the sublime through descriptions of everyday routine amongst family members – however they describe themselves.
Sundance 2022: Drama ‘Palm Trees and Power Lines’ Has a Conscience
Drama Palm Trees and Power Lines is a disquieting, powerful, and mature feature debut that explores the formation of trauma and how vulnerability is exploited.
‘How Civil Wars Start’ Interrogates American Exceptionalism
The same forces that tore apart societies from Yugoslavia to Iraq, Columbia, Northern Ireland, and the West Bank are fully present in the US, warns How Civil Wars Start.
Sundance 2022: ‘Descendant’ and the Americans Who Refuse to Be Forgotten
Descendant films the stories from the progeny of the slaves of the Clotilda. The result is a testament to the spirit of a community that refuses to disappear.