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Guitar Sapiens
The Peruvian guitarist Yuri Juárez sets scenes and drafts landscapes, with sounds put down, like paint, by his expert fingers. He is the guitarist for the Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet, for whom he calls up images and implies great distances, providing song after song, whether studio or live, with a visual field uncannily provoked by…
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Nocturnal Animals
NOCTURNAL ANIMALS is a dig through sedimentary layers of style. This is no surprise from designer-cum–director Tom Ford, whose previous film was the brilliant and controlled A Single Man. The excavation starts, during the credits, at the level of outré contemporary art, with a display of flesh that confronts stock ideas of ugliness, then delves…
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Simon Starling: At Twilight
SIMON STARLING: AT TWILIGHT documents a revival, by Starling, a visual artist, and the theater maker Graham Eatough, of W.B. Yeats’ At the Hawk’s Well, the 1916 Irish folk play that drew on Noh drama to break with Naturalism and realist art in general. Ultimate reality was, to a Symbolist like Yeats, immaterial but accessible…
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American Honey
AMERICAN HONEY is as close to guileless as film can be, in its shots, its editing, its acting, its casting. It shakes you awake with its freshness. Sasha Lane, plucked off a beach by the director Andrea Arnold to play the lead, is an instinctive talent whose craft seeps from her bones on its own…
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Xi.me.na
The vocal artist Xi.me.na wore paper at Joe’s Pub, which was only so surprising since, when I first saw her, at DROM, she was be-hooped in plastic. The clothes do not, of course, make the singer – the voice does – but they carry an attitude. Hers is fiercely self-assertive and unafraid of ornamentation so…
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Bria Skonberg
It was her sophistication as a storyteller that leapt out when I saw the Canadian trumpeter-vocalist Bria Skonberg’s “Love Songs from the Big Easy” at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in February. It was a few days before Valentine’s Day and she basically told love stories, both in her banter (which was word-for-word in both sets) and…
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Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord‘s LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, now at the Lincoln Center Festival, matches high style with a ragamuffin disdain for it. Molière’s send-up of social snobbery under the reign of Louis XIV, in which the petit bourgeois M. Jourdain aspires to aristocratic status, veers from mannered satire to a savage buffoonery. All manner…
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The Shallows
THE SHALLOWS may not be deep, but it is about something, and, to boot, smartly ironic. Blake Lively makes her way, as the generically named surfer “Nancy,” a med school student re-evaluating her life, to a secluded Mexican beach. She is solo, as her girlfriend travel companion is laid up from a bender the night…
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ma ma
I am avoiding the obvious word to describe Penélope Cruz in MA MA, but so be it if by saying that she illumes the screen I call the cliché to mind. Magda is among her finest creations, a great screen performance. It is no surprise that Julio Medem, the most illuminative of contemporary directors, elicited…
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Body
Blessed Unrest’s BODY is subtitled “Anatomies of Being,” the many, or the several, brought together, like cells in the body, in a one entity. It was conceived and directed by Jessica Burr, scripted by Matt Opatrny in collaboration with the ensemble that created it. There were anonymous interviews along the way, and a visual artist,…