Christine Smallwood

As I Lay Dying

Across thousands of pages, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series presents a relentless excess of its characters’ inner lives; at its best, it poses troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge.

Why Do You Do It This Way?

Episode Eleven of “The Critic and Her Publics”

Time Unregained

In La Captive, Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s La Prisonnière, she offers us a Marcel unredeemed by art.

People of Substance

In Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, a woman brought back from the dead embarks on a headlong pursuit of desire and knowledge. 

Infiltrating Literature

“It’s an ethical project to attempt the impossible task of allowing a text to speak on its own terms, from its own time, while never losing sight of the fact that whatever you find in it is colored by who you are and what you bring to it.”

Poor Torvey!

A new production of A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain emphasizes that everyone in Ibsen’s play suffers under the binding ties of patriarchy. 

The Exorcist

Bret Easton Ellis’s novels are filled with beautiful actors in nightmarish dreamscapes who seem innocent but are revealed to be guilty.

Misreading the Cues

The “balanced-literacy” method of teaching children to read has predominated in American schools since the 1990s. It has been a failure.

The Power of Questions

Jacqueline Rose’s latest book, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, takes up a subject she has not covered before: gendered abuse and harassment.

Dads in Space

Most space movies emphasize the conquest of space. Claire Denis gives us the conquest of people.

The In-Between World

The Dardennes’ film ‘The Kid with a Bike’