Alice Coltrane: Conjurer of the Majestic
Andy Beta’s Alice Coltrane biography, Cosmic Music, is an excellent work about this forward-thinking and often misunderstood musician.
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‘Sun Ra: Do the Impossible’ Achieves the Seemingly Impossible
In its gorgeous embroidery of color, sound, and thoughtful reflection, Sun Ra documentary Do the Impossible achieves the seemingly impossible.
7 French Noirs for Those Long Cold Winter Nights
The French were making their own postwar brand of dark, downbeat, terse, vivid, chic, and cynical criminal melodramas before anyone ever heard the term “French Noir”.
MGM’s ‘Lovely to Look At’ Lives Up to It’s Title
MGM musical Lovely to Look At is gorgeous stuff; the colors bleed so richly and profusely that they spread across the frames like melted crayons.
Mule Boy’s Paratactic Storytelling Method Carries Weight
Like Cormac McCarthy, Andrew Krivak breaks complex actions, narrated in strings of independent clauses, into their elemental parts in Mule Boy.
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Iconic 1960s ‘It Girl’ Jane Birkin Finally Gets Some Respect
Biographer Marisa Meltzer accentuates the inner depth of her talented subject in her book, It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin.
Pantheon’s House of High-Tech Mirrors
The post-human speculative sci-fi series Pantheon asks, can humanity recognize itself in its digital reflection?
Three Robert Hossein Films Evoke Harold Pinter
The three Robert Hossein films in Wicked Games exhibit gender-based power struggles and existentialist tendencies with a touch of absurdism.
‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Finds and Makes Meaning in the Mundane
Ben Whishaw achieves something close to dialectical mesmerism in Peter Hujar’s Day; his performance is simultaneously monumental and mundane.
Bob Dylan Rings in His Ears
Music theorist Steven Rings helps readers understand Bob Dylan the performer, not the lyricist or songwriter, in a welcome and indispensable addition to Dylan scholarship.
‘Things in Nature Merely Grow’ Tackles Death Differently
Yiyun Li’s beautiful and complex autobiography Things in Nature Merely Grow is not about death or loss; it is about who we become when we lose.
‘It Was Just an Accident’ Hides Life’s Extremes in Plain Sight
Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning revenge thriller, It Was Just an Accident, slices into memory and the desire for revenge with a double-edged knife.