Geoffrey O’Brien

‘Magic Sayings by the Thousands’

At the heart of the Kalevala is the shamanistic power of words to transform, lead astray, destroy, create, or bring back to life.

Hitler in Antarctica

A historian of the Third Reich traces the processes by which history is not simply distorted but replaced by a fantastic parallel version.

Becoming the Nightmare

A Timon for Our Time

This production of Timon of Athens mounted by Theatre for a New Audience is described in the program as taking place “sometime in the near future,” but its opening is very much of the present gilded age.

Back on Catfish Row

‘Porgy and Bess’ at the Met

There’s No Place Like Home

A Boundless Capacity for Talk

Orson Welles’s ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’

What is most striking about Orson Welles’s film adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons is Welles’s faithfulness to the novel’s language.

Out of Renoir’s Shadow

Miracle in Bologna

O’Neill’s Dark Energy at BAM

For the first stretch of the opening-night performance of Long Day’s Journey into Night at BAM, I had the uneasy sense that things might have been jumpstarted at too rapid a clip.

Immersed in ‘Cold Water’

It is an old story, but Olivier Assayas makes of it much more than another recapitulation of doomed lovers in flight.

Freudian Noir

David Bordwell’s ‘Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling’

Polymorphous Eden

‘Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables’ at the Whitney Museum

The Pattern and Passion of ‘Phantom Thread’

The particular beauty of Phantom Thread is to establish an intimate acquaintance with three characters who are lifelike by virtue of our inability to sound their depths. We look at them so closely and so long that we feel the presence of some kind of knowledge, even if that is finally another tantalizing fabric, another veil.

Dinner from Hell

Five Magnificent Years

‘Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life’ by Jonathan Gould

Shakespeare's Power Play

Given the perennial relevance of the various injustices it circles around—the sexual exploitation and pious hypocrisy and persecution of whistle blowers—Measure for Measure invites updating.

The Magician of Delight

Lubitsch’s films depict a world where sex is everywhere but just out of sight behind discreetly closed doors, constantly implied in what is never quite stated.

O'Neill's Strange Vaudeville

The early 1920s were a busy time for Eugene O’Neill, who wrote The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape—both currently being performed in New York—within a year of each other.