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Little White Lies
I do not have a great deal to say about Guillaume Canet‘s two-and-a-half-hour LITTLE WHITE LIES. It was, undeniably, adroit. I was mildly impatient with it before it won me over through sheer psychological manipulation. This film about a group of vacationing friends, one of whose number has landed in the hospital with life threatening injuries…
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Wuthering Heights
One of the clearer processes of action and reaction in cultural history was that Romanticism reacted against Neo-Classicism, that Naturalism reacted in turn against Romanticism, and that, in a somewhat minor aftershock, Aestheticism recoiled from Naturalism. Amongst the many remarkable things about the new film of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is that it brings the…
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Cosmopolis
The 2003 novel by Don DeLillo (which I have not read) may have been a cautionary tale, but David Cronenberg’s film version of COSMOPOLIS is a dystopian fantasy of the present. The financialization of the world economy is complete. The captains of finance are threatened by mobs in Times Square and knife attacks on live…
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Beloved
In the early frames of BELOVED the ’60s Parisian shopgirl played by the resplendent Ludivine Sagnier lifts a pair of Dior pumps at closing time. She puts them on outside and thus begins her chance career as a streetwalker, through which she meets her Czech lover and the father of her child, whom decades later…
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Camila Meza • North Square
From time to time when I have needed a place to park myself prior to a later engagement, I have dropped in at the North Square for a drink. It is sort of perfect as a “lounge,” as a opposed to a bar or club – dimly lit, bartenders rather than mixologists, the sort of…
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Tangolandó • Fain-Mantega
It was, to be sure, a night of non-standard tango at Joe’s Pub. Tangolandó, fusing tango song with a distinctive Afro-Peruvian rhythm, closed out a program that began with the Dúo Fain-Mantega, consisting of piano and flute, the latter one of the early instruments in tango orchestras, along with the harp and violin, but not…
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Heartless
In the mid-’80s I ventured to say in a published review of Sam Shepard’s True West that we were in a presence of a new dramatic genre, which I dubbed “the situation tragedy.” This notion was consistent, in retrospect, with a recognition on the part of Raymond Williams and others that circumstance had replaced action…
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Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet
Last night at Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Gabriel Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet outdid itself with a septet of special features: (1) The rare presence in New York of the band’s original drummer, Hugo Alcázar, as evidenced in this photo, a sharp, witty, assertive artist in every way; (2) a guest appearance by the notable jazz pianist…
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The Things of Life
I was attracted to the THE THINGS OF LIFE, the Claude Sautet series at The Film Society of Lincoln Center, as he is one of those directors whose work I do not know well but which is of evident quality and importance. A contemporary of Nouvelle Vague figures like Godard, Rohmer, Varda and Truffaut, he…
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The Spanish G and T
The tradition in saunas is to be beaten with a pine branch, and so I sought solace in the swelter that was Manhattan on Saturday in the great juniper based cocktail that is a gin and tonic. For that I went straight to Boqueria at its Flatirons location, from which I had received a promotional…