Relatively early in A Prayer for the Dying, a man whose son is afflicted with a particular kind of plague compares his current situation to the Biblical character of Abraham—or, more specifically, the ...

It’s rare to finish reading a book of moral philosophy and immediately want to pass it on to your friends, but Call It Evil is that book. Urgent, sharply written, fascinating and extremely readable, ...

As enormously successful and highly praised as The Kick Inside was, it may be surprising that several of its tracks have ended up at the low end of our ratings. Perhaps less remarkable is the ...

Joko Anwar’s brazenly confident genre approach has won him many fans; indeed, his Satan’s Slaves films are two of the most viewed Indonesian films of all time. Even they could not have predicted, ...

What if you remade the 1946 Oscar-winner The Best Years of Our Lives, a devastating drama about servicemen struggling to readjust to civilian life after World War II–but as a rom-com? That’s the ...

There is a sense of distance running through Edwidge Danticat’s Dèy. Magnolia survives a shooting at a Miami shopping mall, but the event itself is only the beginning of what Danticat wants to explore ...

The question that the group set out to answer was “Why does so much Black music born out of pain sound so joyful?” The answer that they discovered by working through these pieces is that the answer is ...

Although there are surely varying critical evaluations and a wide range of unique personal perspectives, the general consensus on the films of Yasujirō Ozu is that the masterpieces begin piling up ...

In the dregs of most major artists’ catalogs lie grievous mistakes and tragic missteps, usually the products of inexperienced youth, weary old age or misbegotten midcareer hubris. Kate Bush has her ...

Once upon a time, back in 2012, Mike Hadreas (who performs under the name Perfume Genius) played the Aladdin Theater in Portland. He was touring on his excellent second record, Put Your Back N 2 It.

Readers will likely be impressed by Kendall’s copious research on Trudeau. He interviews numerous subjects and provides early photographs of Bull Tales and Doonesbury strips. Despite a minor complaint ...

The campaign’s true genius lies in zeroing in on this specific set of records. Rather than risk newbies getting lost in the band’s first three albums, through which they found their sound, or their ...