More Than a Nose That Grows: A New Translation of ‘Pinocchio’
‘Pinocchio’ author Carlo Collodi was a socially concerned writer who wanted his fellow Italians (especially children) to avoid becoming ensnared in a life of penury.
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The Bunkered Decades: Digging into the Atom Bomb’s Effect on Cold War America
When Americans realized the atom bomb their country created could be turned on them, arts and society alike bunkered down into nightmares of nuclear destruction.
Neorealism Meets Fairy Tale in Vittorio De Sica’s ‘Miracle in Milan’
If the escapism in Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan seems simple-minded, even simpler is the cure to society’s ills.
Anatomy of the Wounded: Márta Mészáros’ ‘Adoption’
Márta Mészáros’ film Adoption is empathetic and beady-eyed about the negotiations and indignities of those caught up in social prejudices, especially women.
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.
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?