Nietzsche is often reduced to either a scandal or a vocabulary of rebellion. His writing offers fiction something more demanding: a way to examine desire,…
Reviews
Jacques Tati’s films treat architecture as more than a backdrop. Walls, windows, pavements and rooms determine how characters move, collide and misunderstand…
Grief in The Leftovers is not treated as a problem waiting for a solution. Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s series begins with an impossible event: on 14…
Frédéric Chopin’s music seems to speak in a private voice, even when performed in a crowded concert hall. A nocturne can feel like a thought remembered after…
Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings feel like horror even when no monster leaps from the panel. A blade grows from a human ear; a giant listens inside a hollow…
Kundera’s fiction makes displacement more than a biographical fact. After the 1968 Soviet invasion ended the Prague Spring, he was silenced, his books removed…
Guillermo del Toro builds his films from old material, yet the effect is rarely museum-like. Fairy tales, Catholic legends, ghost stories and invented Mexican…
The Nightmare Before Christmas looks like a decorated confection: a pumpkin-headed mayor, a rag-doll heroine, a Christmas takeover and a villain made from an…
Punk rock in Poland was never simply an imported burst of speed. It grew from late-1970s experiments with the “Polish School” of painting, underground cabaret,…
Released in 1979, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker turns a science-fiction premise into a metaphysical road movie. The Writer, Professor and Guide cross a forbidden…