When Ingmar Bergman’s “Shame” premiered in 1968, the critic Renata Adler was quick to offer an interpretation. Reviewing the film in The New York Times, she asserted that “the shame of the title is God’s.” Indeed, throughout his career, Bergman elucidated existential questions of faith and fate. Adler’s analysis, however, misses what is for me the…
My grandmother had the fortune of living in Los Angeles during the Golden Age of Hollywood, moving to the City of Angels as a child in 1949 and living there ever since. Working at the star-studded Riviera Country Club as a professional ice skater and dancer, she had regular interactions with the social elite of…
Quoting Emily Dickinson, Helen Oyeyemi’s first short story collection, “What is Not Yours is Not Yours,” begins with the epigraph of “open me carefully” and swiftly delves into an exquisite unravelling of storytelling and reality. To great effect, Oyeyemi explores and broaches the boundaries of traditional narrative expectations, balancing fantasy and the surreal over a…
After what seemed like a few centuries, the final season of “Game of Thrones” has descended to us from the heavens. Predictably, the HBO streaming service crashed, which led the watch party in my dorm to lament loudly at the projector. It’s a little strange to sit here at the beginning of the end of…
Toward the end of Fritz Lang’s 1953 film noir, the detective Dave Bannion suddenly realizes that he has been double-crossed. The widow of a slain policeman reveals that she was complicit in her husband’s murder. In a rage, Bannion pushes her into the mantlepiece and puts his coarse hands around her neck. “With you dead,” he…
It has been ten years since the premiere of Pixar’s “Up,” and I’m feeling old. Putting aside my personal age-related crises, however, this has always been a special movie for me. I was charmed when I first saw it in theaters, falling in love with the imaginative concept of an elderly man tying balloons to…
Most theatrical performances begin with a short, functional reminder to silence your cellphones and abstain from recording. It’s not really a part of the show itself — it’s a courtesy notice, the kind of thing you throw in more because it’d be bad if you didn’t rather than any positive force toward it. Ram’s Head…
Even before they take a consequential detour, the characters in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 film have difficulty making their dreams come true. Al Roberts aspires to play piano at Carnegie Hall, but he has been stuck serenading seedy patrons of the Break o’ Dawn Club for years. His girlfriend, Sue, wants to be a Hollywood…
