Film & Performing Arts Archives

Film

Paolo Sorrentino on his new movie, La Grazia

An interview with the Italian film director on ordinariness, doubt, and jealousy at the heart of his new film

December 8, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor and Paolo Sorrentino

Editorial note: This interview contains spoilers. Paolo Sorrentino’s films are grand affairs, with elaborate camerawork and stunning settings underscored by memorable music. The plots match the grandeur of the mise-en-scène. In his new film, La Grazia, the purely cinematic elements of the film remain grand—and at times knowingly bizarre, like the ...

Paolo Sorrentino on his new movie, <em>La Grazia</em>

Film & Performing Arts

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Blame it on Mommy and Daddy

October 10, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American ...

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Film & Performing Arts

The Art of Change: A Libretto

Opera 0.2: A Prelude

September 18, 2025 • by Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Chiara Bottici and Matteo Procuranti

Synopsis: A community decides to pursue its revolutionary dream by adopting the principle of accelerated change, and applies it to every aspect of social life. The result is a utopian (or dystopian) world that may (or may not) turn out to be ours. Event 1. Prologue Flutist in dialogue with video projections ...

Film & Performing Arts

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

A conversation with German novelist Daniel Kehlmann

June 17, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor and Daniel Kehlmann

Mitchell Abidor interviews Daniel Kehlmann about examining the curious saga of Austrian filmmaker G. W. Pabst in his new novel, THE DIRECTOR....

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

Film & Performing Arts

In I’m Still Here, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Political engagement must not preclude the fullness of life

April 9, 2025 • by Sonali Chakravarti

Put on earrings. Go out for ice cream. Swim. Expose the conditions of torture. For Eunice Paiva, the protagonist of 2024 Brazilian film I’m Still Here, the fight against dictatorship has a rhythm. After being interrogated about her association with communists and terrorists, she must now try to find out where ...

In <em>I’m Still Here</em>, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Film & Performing Arts

Manga Colossus Goes Inflatable on Broadway

A review of Attack on Titan: The Musical

November 26, 2024 • by Abha Deshmukh

Sitting in a mezzanine seat at the New York City Center, I was startled by a Colossal Titan coming to eat me. But I relaxed when Survey Corps soldiers came spinning and flying on their mobility gear to slice the Titan’s neck which is, after all, the proper way to ...

Manga Colossus Goes Inflatable on Broadway

Disability

Shakespeare’s Ultimate Crip Text

In a new Richard III, populism is the pathology

September 10, 2024 • by Antoinette Burton

When I bought my ticket for this summer’s production of Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Globe Theater in London, I chose a seat under cover of the rafters rather than a place standing directly in front of the stage—a distinction designed to echo the several ways that Elizabethans could experience ...

Film & Performing Arts

The Transformations of Katherine Dunham

The dance pioneer’s contributions to postmodern anthropology

June 11, 2024 • by Megan Robinson

The possibilities open to an anthropologist engaging with her fieldwork in a creative way is what drew me to the Dunham Technique in the first place....

Film & Performing Arts

A Band on the Brink of Collapse

David Adjmi’s Stereophonic heads to Broadway

April 9, 2024 • by Emma Minor

The image of musicians in a recording studio beset by interpersonal tensions—while making their best music—is so familiar it leads a listener to wonder, Is the strife all somehow necessary?...