Rachel Maddow on the Bit Players’ Big Effects on Promoting American Fascism
Rachel Maddow’s latest book on political history, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, weaves varying players past into a singular danger present.
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Christopher Hitchens and Fights Worth Having
You can smell the cigarette ash and Johnnie Walker Black Label on the pages of A Hitch in Time, a gleefully pugilistic posthumous Christopher Hitchens anthology.
The Settlers’ Blood-Chilling Journey into Humankind’s ‘Heart of Darkness’
Chilean revisionist Western, The Settlers, is a powerful film whose director shows admirable moral integrity that’s often absent in film history.
M. Scott Momaday’s ‘House Made of Dawn’ Offers Light to See By
In the 1969 Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn, Native American author M. Scott Momaday confronts an infinite darkness in nature and ourselves.
‘La Cérémonie’ Explores Social Class Struggles with Chilling Exactitude
Filmed under a cool glass of calm and enwrapped in an airy atmosphere, La Cérémonie makes judicious use of its setting to starkly contrast its warring classes.
‘Skywalkers: A Love Story’ Dances on the Edge of Love
Skywalkers: A Love Story will endure because it’s not trapped in the moment of a daring acrobatic stunt; it’s rooted in the timeless human experience.
‘Pedro Páramo’ Is a Masterpiece that Resurrects and Welcomes the Dead
In our world, we irrevocably control the dead and their narrative. In Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece Pedro Páramo, however, the dead control their narrative.
Teju Cole’s ‘Tremor’ Records a Post-COVID Landscape of Art and Rage
If there is any consolation to be had in Teju Cole’s slippery and sinuous Tremor, it’s not found in art or literature but in the music that permeates its pages.
Gothic Tribes: The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst Explores Pop Music’s Dark Artists
Tolhurst’s goth music history intimately details the mercurial movement, interweaving personal memories and descriptions of the “architects of darkness”.
Personhood and Performance in Alexis Soloski’s ‘Here in the Dark’
Alexis Soloski’s Here in the Dark illuminates the act of performance (no matter the stage) and the notion of stepping into and out of one’s personhood.
Nicolas Cage Biography ‘How Coppola Became Cage’ Focuses on Methods and Cooperation
Zach Schonfeld’s compulsively readable, well-researched book on Nicolas Cage, How Coppola Became Cage, gets to the heart of the unique, multitalented actor.
Spoof of Spooks ‘Slow Horses: Season 3’ Is a Wild Ride
Slow Horses is acutely aware that it’s entertainment. Many scenes play like spoofs of the straight-faced crummy thrillers that pose as prestige cinema.