Fiction Reviews
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
April 22, 2025Oliver won’t socialize. He won’t even speak. He simply spends his days wrapped in his obsession,...
Video Games
Video Game Review: Bayonetta
April 22, 2025She also wears glasses, which may pass for originality these days but is thematically appropriate because...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Some Like It Hot: The Official 50th Anniversary Companion by Laurence Maslon
April 21, 2025There’s plenty about Monroe, of course — her perpetual lateness to the set, her entourage (especially...
Art
Portraiture Now: Communities at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
April 21, 2025The astonishing amount of detail, the tremendous amount of work that went into crafting the tiny...
Art
Italics: Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution 1968–2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
April 21, 2025In Roberto Cuoghi’s 2006 portrait of Davide Halevim, one of the highlights of the section entitled...
Fiction Reviews
You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr
April 21, 2025The religious and cultural tensions present in this book, while controversial, are always handled with grace...
Movies
Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes
April 21, 2025Ritchie, whose previous films Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch are cult favorites, brings...
Fiction Reviews
Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving
April 20, 2025For Last Night in Twisted River is the work of a seasoned tale-teller, a writer who...
Movies
The Top 10 Movies of 2009
April 20, 2025At the end, she’s back at square one leading the student life, but inside, she’s grown...
Movies
The 10 Best Movies of the Decade (2000-2009)
April 20, 2025Wong Kar-wai’s beautiful tone poem is an ode to unrequited and impossible love. Its brilliant color...
Fiction Reviews
The Ghost King: Transitions III by R. A. Salvatore
April 20, 2025A fast-paced, heartrending book, The Ghost King is a must-read for any fans of the Drizzt...
Movies
Movie Review: Nine
April 19, 2025Marshall apparently strove for the early 60s New Wave Cinema feel, which relied heavily on shaky...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Critics’ Picks: Best Books of 2009
April 19, 2025Our annual selection of noteworthy books.
Fiction Reviews
Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers
April 19, 2025What’s remarkable about her is that she shares her story with the class simply, with a...
Movies
Movie Review: The Princess and the Frog
April 19, 2025Cinderella and Snow White are famously hardworking Disney princesses, but they were enslaved as a punishment...
Movies
Movie Review: Avatar
April 18, 2025The story and script fail to create multifaceted characters, sticking instead to the inherent malevolence of...
Non-Fiction Reviews
The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson
April 18, 2025In some respects, the Thirty Years War resembles the Great War of 1914-1918. Political friction in...
Non-Fiction Reviews
The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James Bradley
April 18, 2025James Bradley doesn't like Theodore Roosevelt. Let's get that clear from the get-go. Nor does he...
Movies
Movie Review: A Single Man
April 18, 2025Based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel, the film is set in the 1960s and takes place over...
Fiction Reviews
Matchless by Gregory Maguire
April 17, 2025Matchless was originally composed by Maguire for the radio, and the story retains a sense of...
Art & Design
Paul Bril’s Restored Paintings in the San Silvestro Chapel at Rome’s Sancta Sanctorum
April 15, 2025Born in Antwerp in 1554, Bril was working in Italy at the end of the century,...
Art
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
April 13, 2025The people of that ancient nation had been decimated in the opening genocide of modern times,...
Non-Fiction Reviews
In My Father’s Shadow by Chris Welles Feder
April 12, 2025Orson had become so famous for his villainous role as Harry Lime in The Third Man...
Art
Francis Alÿs: Fabiola at the National Portrait Gallery, London
April 2, 2025Perhaps what fascinated him about these portraits was that they show this urge to create and...
Art
Tim Burton at MoMA
April 17, 2025Predictably, Tim Burton is already a wildly popular show. As throngs of families, film buffs and...
Biography
Marlee Matlin: Bold Moves and Few Regrets
March 28, 2025"I worry about nothing except doing work that I like and that I look at as...
Biography
Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame
April 8, 2025Never perhaps has there been such a masterful account of the man’s failures—and successes—in this country’s...
Art
The Barnes Foundation: Beauty Surrounded by Controversy
April 8, 2025And what a treasure trove! By the time of his death in 1951, Barnes had purchased...
Art & Design
Ron Arad: No Discipline at MoMA
April 4, 2025The experience of viewing “No Discipline,” the first major U.S. retrospective of the virtuosic, Israeli-born designer...
Fiction Reviews
Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
April 6, 2025But, as we see in the terrifying drawings of his radiologist father giving him neck adjustments—“kkrraackk,”...