Andrew Katzenstein

The Impressionist

Over more than fifty years of documentary filmmaking, Frederick Wiseman has made an art of withholding judgment and showing people figuring things out on their own.

‘Haunted, Haunted’

The characters in Mike Leigh’s new feature, anchored by a magnificent performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, hardly seem to be living in his usual noisy democracy.

Son of the Thin Man

“I suspect a lot of writers develop their style to offset qualities they otherwise find lacking in themselves.”

Mode for Joe

The tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was at once a vessel of tradition and a Romantic individualist, a consummate professional in an art form that lionized rebels.

Fools in Love

Screwball comedies are among the most beloved films of Hollywood’s golden age, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.

In the Path of Totality

Dispatches from the 2024 solar eclipse

An Ensemble of One

The cellist Abdul Wadud had a virtuosic command of many musical languages, from bebop to free jazz, chamber music, and Delta blues.

Escaping from Notes to Sounds

Albert Ayler was not the first to exploit the saxophone’s capacity for nontraditional noises, but he was the first to create a coherent musical language from them alone.

Provocation from Another Soul

“Stanley Cavell was a dazzling teacher. You felt that he was opening his private studio to you, showing you how philosophy gets done rather than simply reporting his findings after the fact.”

The Prophetic Character of Russian Literature

“Pasternak remarked that ‘a book is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience—and nothing else!’ Russian writers asked ultimate questions under extreme conditions.”

A Well-Ventilated Conscience

The digressive, playful, and irreverent Machado de Assis.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Danse Macabre

Christopher King’s ‘Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe’s Oldest Surviving Folk Music’

Alice Coltrane’s Bliss

An important jazz musician in her own right, Alice Coltrane recorded a dozen albums under her own name, including Hindu chants performed in gospel arrangements.

Bernhard on Bernhard

In Thomas Bernhard: Three Days, a documentary filmed in Hamburg in 1970, the Austrian novelist and playwright says, “As far as I am concerned, I am no writer, I am somebody who writes.”

Prince of the Player Piano

The Whitney Museum is now hosting an eleven-day festival celebrating the work of American expatriate composer Conlon Nancarrow, who is best known for his innovative studies for player piano.