Geoffrey O’Brien

Schemes Gone Awry

Richard Wilbur’s translations of Molière, now in the Library of America, have a fluency that goes beyond meter and rhyme to encompass textures of speech and movements of thought.

Verdi’s Decentered Epic

The six principal characters of Don Carlos grasp at separate ends, but nothing is finally to be attained.

Notes from Underground

Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s new opera recasts the Orphic myth with Eurydice as the central character.

‘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