Collide, Collude, Confront

I was in Iraq to report “objectively” on the war. Collecting my photographs from two decades there, I wanted to expose the constraints of my perspective.

March 19, 2023

The Lost Promise of Environmental Rights

Fifty years ago, working-class activists tried to make courts and legislatures affirm rights to clean air and water. Today that strategy is on the verge of a comeback.

March 15, 2023

Michaelina’s Boys

In “The Five Senses,” the long-forgotten Flemish painter Michaelina Wautier shows her vision of vision. 

March 12, 2023

‘Joan Doesn’t Give a Damn’

The San Francisco painter Joan Brown snubbed success at every turn.

March 9, 2023

Clean Lines, Messy Lives

“The Hernandez brothers’ recurring characters have aged and sprawled out into baroque, visionary stories that alternate between near-anthropologic detail, fantastical pulp, and sexual fetishes.”

July 23, 2020 issue

Guston’s Graphic Novel

In the summer of 1971, the painter Philip Guston, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, began a series of drawings under the working title of “Poor Richard” that grew out of his disgust and fascination with Richard Nixon.

February 6, 2018

A Triumph of the Comic-Book Novel

“The smooth, geometric forms in Chris Ware’s comics are icons and symbols as much as pictures, ‘a sort of symbolic typography’ meant to be read and understood, ‘not scrutinized individually as one might carefully peruse a painting or a drawing.’”

December 20, 2012 issue

Gerhard Richter’s Cartoons

Before the blurry “photo paintings”—large images based on family snapshots or magazine ads—that would establish his preeminence, Gerhard Richter experimented with another form of Pop: cartoon drawings.

February 5, 2017

His Inner Cat

Nearly a century after George Herriman started Krazy Kat, the endlessly perplexing, energetic, deep, and playful comic strip still feels new.

June 14, 2007 issue

Comics for Grown-Ups

“Joe Sacco, a Malta-born writer and artist who lives in New York, has taken nonfiction comics onto untested ground. He is doing journalism—first-hand depth reporting on hard-news subjects—in ink drawings and word balloons.”

August 14, 2003 issue

The Instrumentalist

At the heart of the film Tár is a conductor who cannot see beyond her generation’s field of vision.

January 19, 2023 issue

In Defense of Fiction

We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it.

October 24, 2019 issue

On Optimism and Despair

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities.

December 22, 2016 issue

Moon Over Miami

Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight isn’t trying to be realistic about anything, even as it confounds what we expect from stories about young black men, starting with the film’s texture, its intricate soundtrack, tantric pace, and beauty frame by frame.

April 20, 2017 issue

Birdman’s Comic Horror

Birdman charges forward, headlong and without stopping, alternately scourging and exalting its audience with the genuine pain and the holy-fool ridiculousness of a “washed-up” former superhero.

January 28, 2015

Born Too Late

The Last Emperor is a spectacular film photographed in brilliant color. It is also a moral drama with controversial political overtones of great ambiguity.

February 18, 1988 issue

A Dissent on ‘Schindler’s List’

Oskar Schindler was an exotic exception, and Stephen Spielberg lets viewers take comfort in his virtuous behavior, but the Holocaust raises terrible questions about humanity, and it is these questions that the director did not ask.

April 21, 1994 issue

B-flat Movie

To give Amadeus every benefit of the doubt, we might assume that the presentation of Mozart as a fool is an intended irony, and congratulate the director for having chosen the best way to fail with an insoluble problem.

April 11, 1985 issue

Letter from ‘Manhattan’

The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall and Interiors are, with one exception, presented as adults, but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life.

August 16, 1979 issue

Lispector, Cronista

“The crônica demands a certain capacity for boredom, for being open to fleeting, small scenes of the quotidian.”

March 18, 2023

Whose Streets?

“For the Sisi regime Tahrir is a dangerous place from which the memory of the uprising needs to be erased. It belongs to the state now, and no one else.”

March 11, 2023

The Right to Be Artful

“The advantage of the prison journalist is the ability to access the pure story without first coming to know the character through his worst deed.”

March 4, 2023