I am very wary of any movie on its fifth installment. In my day <wry smile to make it seem ironic when it’s just true that I’m middle-aged>, we had trilogies At The Most. Now, every animated film has to outdo Rocky in the numbers department. That wry smile loses some of its irony when I reflect that this franchise has already seen three main actors die and be replaced (Estelle Harris, Jim Varney, and Don Rickles). Hearing their characters’ not-right voices makes me sad (as does the lack of any lines for my beloved Aliens). Oh well, things get old, new people replace familiar ones, and we are all protestors at time’s march. These are the very themes of the Toy Story franchise. And they are renewed for another generation of kids and used-to-be-kids with this fifth film. (If you count Lightyear, which is referenced here, it’s the sixth!)

But there is something about this story and these characters that allows them to always step up to the plate and take on the new iterations of those old themes. And it’s possible that Toy Story 5—to my shock—may be my favorite in the series yet.

I have not been too impressed with the recent Pixar films. The last three (Inside Out 2, Elio, and Hoppers) have been disappointments for me. But the old Pixar formula is back! (And, let’s face it, the Pixar formula is really the Toy Story formula.) This new film artfully balances the tricky trifecta of humor, sentiment, and action. All three are pushed to their zeniths. The one-liners haven’t been this good since the 1995 original, and a lot of work has clearly gone into the story to maximize the emotional heft (hang on to your hankies) and multiply exciting set pieces.

This time around, Jessie is the main character—finally. And my girl, Joan Cusack, is up to the challenge. Of course, Woody and Buzz are along for the ride with their odd couple banter, along with all the principles. Even the gang from Toy Story 4 all get solid cameos. (Barbie is absent. Perhaps Warner Brothers has taken all its Mattel marbles and gone home.) New characters mostly include “devices”—technological playthings that may be bringing about the End of the Toys. The antagonist is a kid-marketed tablet named Lilypad (Greta Lee), and some early digital advancements (a camera, a GPS unit, and…a potty-training aide) are voiced by Shelby Rabara, Craig Robinson, and Conan O’Brien.

Along with all the things it is juggling so well, the movie adds a canny range of anxieties, observations, and debates about our relationship to screens. In a refreshing change of focus, the toys’ goal this time around is to point their kid, Bonnie, outside to make friends with other humans. It’s no spoiler to say that it doesn’t go well, because they spend an hour and forty-two minutes in the attempt. The solutions that arise are built of compromise, empathy, forgiveness, adjustment, and a let’s-try attitude…like all good Pixar endings.

After a slow start, the first half of 2026 has served up some great films: Project Hail Mary, Disclosure Day, and Mother Mary all join Toy Story 5 to make a respectable early crop. I do have a strange feeling that the year’s second half will underwhelm, but as this film just reminded me, I have been wrong before.

And, Pixar executives, I have a pitch for Toy Story 6: Andy returns as a college freshman—with his roommate Rob, aka “The Master,” and his retro toaster, little and brave—for a reunion with his old toys! Blanky, meet Forky.

Paddy Chayefsky. The greatest screenwriter in history? Maybe. His name is enough to make me watch a movie. (And here, Frederic March’s name seals the deal. No other actor could do this so well!)

In the hands of any other writer, these characters would have clear feelings that they and we understood perfectly. Like every film. You would be able to boil a character down to a motivation. And we are used to it. We love it. We revere it. We expect it. Because it looks like life; it sounds like life; but it’s not. We don’t want to watch life because we have to live it.

And then, Chayefsky comes along with a script so full of the unidentifiable realities of life, and I realize that this is what I want. I just don’t believe anyone is able to write it. Paddy Chayefsky.

Everything—every word—in this film rings true, but rings as if we ourselves were the bell. And we are shaken and swung and collide with the same hammer over and over again. And all the while, what beautiful sounds those impacts make!

These characters don’t know what they feel, what they think, or what they want any more than we do. Sure, for a day, for a minute…but we change immediately and reach for the thing we say we hate and stomp on the things we say we love and listen to the people we call liars. And, as March’s character says toward the end of this wonderful movie, “Love’s a shabby business, but it’s all there is.” The distance from “loving” to “living” is just “I”, just a personal interiority of the experience. And living is such a shabby business. And it really is all there is.

And yet it’s so hard! Just watch these people try to speak kindly, try to be truthful, try to react honestly. When they succeed, it is just as ephemeral as when they fail. We strain and grope and sometimes grasp who we are and what we want. And it’s as shabby as anything. But why escape from it? It feels so shameful to contradict yourself every other sentence. But everyone is doing it, just as we are.

And we feed on simplified narratives that rely on constant—if complex—characters. And we begin to believe it is life. And we nail motivations to actual humans. And we assign unchanging opinions to the image-bearers of God. And we pretend to know who we all are. The wind blows. The grass fades. An unfaithful people spins and collides.

And Paddy Chayefsky takes dictation.

Welcome to the Steven Spielberg Cinematic Universe. You’ve been here all along.

It has been a long time since I had a cinematic experience like Disclosure Day. First of all, the movies I want to see are never in the rooms with the really big screens, but this one was. How I wish that I could watch every film on such a scale! It was incredible. But, all that screen means nothing if the movie is no good. This movie is so good! Like, “oh, this is what going to the cinema is like,” good. Like “I can’t unclench my body” good. Like “jaw on floor, next to tears” good. This is, finally finally finally, a true summer blockbuster. A blockbuster like we haven’t seen in decades. A blockbuster the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days of…Steven Spielberg.

I cannot tell you much about this movie, as the entire tension is the unfolding “disclosure” that is so masterfully teased out over the length of the film. Spielberg throws us right into the mystery with no preparation (except for some very well-made trailers), and we have to piece it all together on the run, as it were—just like our stars, Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor. That kind of storytelling—done at this level—is hypnotic. Narratives are built on our drive to get answers, our need to know what happens next, and the electrical tension of having just enough information to long for the next scene—and no more.

Blockbuster narratives, of course, are also built on exciting set pieces: chases, reversals, secrets, betrayals, explosions, and shadowy pursuers. It’s all here. It’s all thrilling. This film manages to do so much at the same time! It strings together perfectly pitched scenes of suspense and danger with carefully metered out exposition, overwhelming emotion, and a passel of themes and subplots that turn out not to be subplots.

There are easily half a dozen concomitant stories that you can choose to trace. The film has as many layers as you wish to seek. It works marvelously as simply great storytelling. But you could also examine the questions it raises about humanity’s innate worship instinct and the essential nature of faith, be it misplaced or not. You could look into its comments on what I officially dub political downheaval: a sort of socioeconomic entropy. Within such a framework, it looks at how humans have a basic drive to question and an inherent sense of when they are being lied to. It can talk to you about the nature of the Image and the power of media. Its questions about the inherent goodness or badness of humanity can be plumbed. It tackles issues of responsibility to use knowledge well. Do you disclose every piece of information you have and let the consequences come? Do you have a duty to allow people to choose how much they wish to know? Do you want to know everything you know? Do you wish to find out the answers to all of your questions? And who makes those decisions on behalf of humanity in general? Do you have a right to choose your level of ignorance? Is truth always a good thing?

Do you REALLY want to satisfy that drive for answers that pushes you through a good narrative, when you don’t know what those answers might be?

Disclosure Day is phenomenal for many reasons. Emily Blunt gives the greatest performance of her life, and she deserves an Oscar for it. Colin Firth is a great misguided mastermind. Eve Hewson (Bono’s daughter) has an especially impactful scene with Firth that provokes a physical reaction in the viewer, as she deftly juggles themes of faith, insanity, technology, abuse of power, and agency. The film fits nicely into Spielberg’s canon, bridging such films as E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and even Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The sheer spectacle and entertainment value are massive.

Underneath (or perhaps overtop) of everything, it is a call for radical empathy. And, darn it, I cried during the credits because I felt part of the human race. I felt the breadth and size of the human race and my place within it. I felt like I belonged in it. How did Steven Spielberg make me feel something I have never felt before? I’m starting to think that he can do anything, even reignite the magic of the cinematic experience.

Perhaps Charles Dickens’s least-read novel, Barnaby Rudge is currently my favorite. Rudge was the first time Dickens had put in the time before he started publishing to cement his story, its themes, and its characters. His book prior to this one—The Old Curiosity Shop—especially showed the signs of the author making it up as he wrote. (His novels were released serially, and the demand was so great that he was publishing them long before he knew where the plots were actually headed.)

The main setting for the novel is the Gordon Riots that terrorized London in 1780, but the book starts well before these events, introducing a rich array of characters embroiled in the usual romances, intrigues, domestic strife, and hidden treachery. The book follows these stories—all of which hold a wonderful sense of the otherworldly, the supernatural, and the sinister—before suddenly breaking with its characters’ mysteries and introducing the historical figure of Lord Gordon. Gordon incited the populace of London, ripe for rebellion, into days of violent and destructive riots that targeted Catholics.

Suddenly, in the middle of a number of interesting and interweaving tales, the world is upended by the Gordon Riots. The technique is quite effective, as unrelated public figures and events rip our characters (and ourselves) out of their very unfinished narrative arcs, plunging them unexpectedly into a horrifying waking nightmare that makes all their quotidian concerns look petty.

Dickens writes of the riots with a terrifying precocity that rivals the greatest passages in fiction from any time. All of the shades of unnatural evil that he had worked into the characters’ stories pay off in the most unexpected way, as all of London is transformed into a senseless and pitiless scene straight out of hell. The damage of these vicious days is immense, with over seventy Catholic homes burned to the ground and an unknowable number of dead. And for all the disorder and chaos of this time, Dickens always reminds us that it is private grudges, innate violent urges, and mob insanity that are the true agents of hate—all of which make the climax feel inexorable and like some fated sacking of the city.

The madness of this historical event (about fifty years in the past when Dickens was writing) is reflected and questioned in the main character, an “idiot boy” in his twenties. Perceptive and imaginative, Barnaby is more effective than Dickens’s prior child saints (such as Oliver Twist and Little Nell) because he is not a child, although he is treated as one. Easily manipulated to any end, Barnaby is a picture of the common people of London, used as deadly weapons by Gordon and his lackeys. However, he is also a picture of innocence in his facility of forgetting, a phenomenon which had worked for good and ill in the fifty years between these events and Dickens’s day.

Barnaby is also a figure in whom the author—often accused of madness for eccentricities like his pet raven and restless bodily presence—writes himself. He is the point of convergence that can bring all of these events and characters together, like Barnaby. He has the capacity to see it all with a detached and fanciful eye, like Barnaby. Most notably, Barnaby also has a pet raven who can repeat certain phrases like a parrot and who became the actual inspiration for Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem.

Of course, through the disruption of the riots—and in their aftermath—the various stories set in motion at the beginning of the novel eventually play themselves out, resulting in a doubly cathartic resolution and denouement. A number of these private stories are about the mistakes and abuses of fathers. This ultimately unifies the two strands of the book in a close and complex scrutiny of rebellion against authority in all its forms.

While Barnaby Rudge is 750 pages, I tore through it like the fire in the streets, caught up in the quality of the writing—which includes Dickens’s trademark humor amid the passages of chilling tragedy—and a deep investment in the characters that are introduced in the first third of the book. I recommend the audiobook, ably read by Nicholas Boulton.

I am a big fan of the original cartoons featuring He-Man and She-Ra, so I knew from the trailers that this was not going to be my cup of tea. Nicholas Galitzine was better than I thought, and the big surprise was that Jared Leto’s Skeletor is pretty much perfect. On the whole, though, this movie is more confused about its identity than Prince Adam.

There is not a firm unifying vision in the film. It seems like everyone is on a slightly different page and doing their thing with no director to pull it together. One reason I was nervous about this film when it was announced is that the tone of the original is very specific and of-its-time, but it works like lightning in a bottle. Trying to bottle that lightning again in 2026 had high odds of ending in electrocution.

There doesn’t seem to be a group consensus on what is played straight and what is lovingly mocked. One successful example is that Adam, who has been lost on Earth for fifteen years, christened the people in his childhood memories with the names a ten-year-old might use: Ram Man, Fisto, etc. There is a lot of humor that arises from this idea, especially concerning the unfortunate name of Fisto. That should give you an idea of the adult nature of the laughs. This movie is all about sex jokes delivered by your childhood cartoon heroes. It’s uncomfortable. And not at all subtle. Skeletor even talks about the “big, long sword dangling between those glorious thighs.” And yet, the jokes are the only things that actually work well, despite their often crude nature.

I read an interview in which the director lamented not being able to include Mer-Man because there were just too many characters. And yet he highlights obscure characters like Goat Man and ridiculous heroes like Mekaneck. Of course, this film wants more diversity, and that’s fine, but adding warrior-woman Dian—who is basically Teela—is a dumb way to achieve it. Genderswap one of the existing characters, like they do with Roboto (who, voiced by Kristen Wiig gets some great lines). The rosters of heroes (Ram Man, Mekaneck, Man-at-Arms, Teela, Roboto, Fisto, Dian, The Sorceress, and Moss Man) and villains (Beast-Man, Goat Man, Trap Jaw, Evil-Lyn, Tri-Klops, Spikor, and some guy from the 1987 movie named Klarg) seem somewhat random. A number of those characters don’t get anything to do (Tri-Klops doesn’t even rotate to another eye), and some essential characters like Orko and Mer-Man don’t really show up.

Speaking of Wiig, who voices a CGI Roboto…she’s funny, but her voice doesn’t fit in with the rest of the world. The same is true of Cringer’s voice. And poor Cringer only becomes Battle Cat for a quick shot at the end. The aesthetic is odd, half Mattel and half Peter Jackson. I couldn’t watch Spikor or Beast-Man roar without seeing the orcs. And, like the humor, the fight scenes are aimed at adults. Characters die, and the fighting is simultaneously dorky and violent.

Above all, the biggest problem with the script is that it exiles Adam on Earth (so that he can use corporate de-escalation talk before resorting to violence) for fifteen years, during which Skeletor rules Eternia. He-Man was always about the heroes being the ones in power, while She-Ra was a story of resistance against a world ruled by evil. Those were their basic identities. But I suppose no one today is willing to accept the ruling class as heroes. And so, even during the short scenes of King Randor’s reign, he is a bully, publicly humiliating young Adam for his lack of manliness. Randor was always concerned about Adam’s disinterest in royal life, but he usually discussed it quietly with Queen Marlena. He didn’t barge into Man-at-Arms’s training session to challenge his ten-year-old son to a sword battle, berate him for losing, and leave with a haughty air.

And that’s another aspect of the film that’s neither here nor there. It wants to talk about what makes a man…but Adam’s attempts to talk it out and appeal to Skeletor’s inner humanity always fail, making the nonviolent version of masculinity a laughingstock. It still comes down to fighting…constant boring fighting. Aside from the main protagonist and antagonist, no one puts in a great performance, but Alison Brie finds a whole new nadir of acting as Evil-Lyn. She’s absolutely awful. And, like everyone in this confused CGI fest, she’s in her own movie that doesn’t match any of the other private movies scattered everywhere.

There’s no director out there with as strict a formula as John Carney. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, I am sure the titles of his Irish pop-centric films will: Once, Begin Again, Sing Street, and Flora and Son. Power Ballad is his new music dramedy. It stars Paul Rudd as a struggling musician and Nick Jonas’s chest hair with a special appearance by Nick Jonas’s thighs. Jonas stretches those acting muscles by playing an ex-boy band member who just can’t stop singing boy band-style music long enough to be taken seriously as a solo act.

Despite that chest hair and those very impressive thighs (why would he NOT play the climactic scene in swim trunks?), the only thing I respect about Nick Jonas is his ability to remain married to Priyanka Chopra. He can only sing one way (boy band), and he recently invaded musical theatre, killing the first Broadway production of The Last Five Years despite the assistance of Adrienne Warren.

Paul Rudd also breaks out of the typecasting mold by playing a genuinely nice guy with effortless charisma. And his last name just happens to be Power. And he just happens to have written a ballad that suddenly shows up on boy band bro’s new album…much to his surprise…and other emotions.

That’s the movie. While there is clearly a soundtrack album with plenty of John Carney-cowritten songs, this movie is about one song. Just one. A song that is basically just a hook. How many times do we have to listen to versions of this song? So many. That song can no more carry an entire movie than Adrienne Warren could carry her two-person musical with Jonas.

Otherwise, it’s a Carney film: nice people getting rough breaks but persevering while playing music in Ireland. Most of Carney’s films are rated R, but this one seems especially out of place with its f-bombs. This could be a fine family affair, except for the oddly unnecessary language. (It was so much an R-rated movie, that a redband trailer played before it!)

Honestly, the Irish actors are the best part: Jack Reynor, Beth Fallon, Peter McDonald, Rory Keenan… They’re all more interesting than our leading characters. And the true protagonist: that darn hook. But, honestly, this all makes it sound worse than it is. It’s okay…nothing more.

I am not a fan of documentaries. I dislike their tone of omniscience. I hate their pretended objectivity—but I hate those with obvious agendas more. I don’t like the social contract that we will pay no attention to the man behind the curtain/camera. They almost all ignore the fact that observing a thing alters it—especially if you put a camera in someone’s face and expect them to act normally. I find the ones that try to adhere to “just the facts” usually boring. I find the ones that set out to prove something with a veneer of fact enraging. I need a narrative! Without a story, I have no interest. But, obviously, every documentary is creating a narrative through selection, presence, and editing. But they aren’t honest about that. (You can see my INFJ flaring.)

Thankfully, there are documentaries that do name their biases, acknowledge their subjectivity, and don’t try to cover their storytelling. In fact, there are a lot! My favorites are (in random order) Four Daughters (2023); Spellbound (2002); Stories We Tell (2012); Man on Wire (2008); The 21 (2024); Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story (2024); Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey (2016); Sans Soleil (1983); Baraka (1992); Man with a Movie Camera (1929); Close-Up Long Shot (1996); Mother, I am Suffocating, This Is my Last Film about You. (2019); Vive le Tour (1962); First Case, Second Case (1979); Place de la République (1974); Statues Also Die (1953); Nest (2022); Animals Distract Me (2011); African Cats (2011); Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry (2021); Song of Styrene (1958); Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor (2003); Night and Fog (1956); and Wait for Your Laugh (2017). That’s SO many! And now we add one more, making a lovely 25: Louis Malle’s Phantom India (1969).

Malle wasn’t intending to make a documentary about India. He was there presenting a slate of French Cinema, and he decided he needed a break. That break turned into six months of traveling across the subcontinent and filming this six-hour doc (which was made along with a 99-minute companion piece on Calcutta alone).

From the very beginning, Malle, in voiceover, tells us that he isn’t looking for anything, admits that his camera enters these places as a weapon, and opens up about trying not to interpret what he sees. Of course, he’s human, so he cannot shed all of his sixties French ideology any more than he can always resist trying to make sense of his experiences. This, then, is the narrative I seek. The protagonist is Malle, and he goes through a very complicated and interesting inner conflict, creating a simple plot. His ideas, however, are anything but simple.

Phantom India (the Frenchman cannot truly touch, let alone grasp, either a specific or abstract “India”) embraces confusion, contradiction, mutability in himself and his subject, and the existential impossibility of cultural translation. At times, he tells us that he could find no explanation for the behavior he was filming, and yet he sees its importance to those who do live and understand it. He wants to release India from his Western political and social assumptions…but he often fails, lapsing into a judge instead of an observer. This attitude would have been radical in 1969, and the real practice of it remains rare over fifty years later.

One of the most important realizations Malle makes is that India is a collection of many religions, cultures, languages, and lifestyles. He begins and ends by talking to “the right people,” i.e., educated Anglophones. He immediately senses that their India is no less a phantom than his (only 2% of the population even spoke English at the time), and he basically flees into the villages. As the population of India exceeded the combined populations of Africa and South America, though, that’s a lot of villages! And so he shoots what he encounters, tells us what basic information he can find out from the people of each area through local translators, and marvels at what seems to be a tolerant diversity at every level of society. (Especially given that this was during Indira Gandhi’s rule, it’s clear that a lot of that tolerance is likely an illusion, however.)

As he watches throngs of Hindus worshiping at their shrines of choice in a large temple, he perceptively wonders if it is in their religious devotion that the Indian people find their only solitude. Although surrounded by milling crowds, the people do have very interior expressions. Even though they are often performing the same actions as the people around them, they are doing so alone and at their own pace. And so he hypothesizes that the lack of codified Hindu rituals and beliefs (and the sheer number of gods) allows each person’s faith to be their only individual possession.

Indeed, he points out that in the West, the base unit of society is the individual. In India, he seems to see a completely different structure. In this structure, he spends a lot of time musing about castes. In France, he reads that there are four castes, but in reality, he encounters more like 200 subdivided groups on an instinctual hierarchy. The government does not acknowledge caste, and yet the system solidifies and perpetuates itself through ages of cultural memory. Not many Indians will talk about caste, and he is unable to identify any outward distinctions, viewed from the outside. Everyone seems to intuit caste at microscopic levels. Nor is it about wealth or privilege. He meets many Brahmans who are penniless and stuck in stigmatized professions. The Untouchables are not all miserable or downtrodden. All his categories explode as he tries to understand this world even a bit.

Phantom India is full of fascinating footage, interesting stories, and unapproachable questions. What’s a Frenchman to do? It is perhaps even more revealing when he breaks into value judgments, praising certain villages for their sexual freedom and dismissing others for their radical religious activity. Usually, if you wait, however, he comes around later in the documentary with corrections, repentances, or abandonment to the unreadable world around him. At all times, it’s engaging and open to unknown complexity. It may be one of the best examples of what I find necessary in a good documentary.

1. The Seven Year Itch (1955)

2. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

3. There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954)

4. All About Eve (1950)

5. The Misfits (1961)

6. Clash by Night (1952)

7. Niagara (1953)

8. How To Marry a Millionaire (1953)

9. Ladies of the Chorus (1948)

10. Bus Stop (1956)

11. The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

12. Let’s Make Love (1960)

13. The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)

14. Home Town Story (1951)

15. Love Nest (1951)

16. Don’t Bother To Knock (1952)

17. River of No Return (1954)

18. As Young As You Feel (1951)

19. Monkey Business (1952)

20. We’re Not Married! (1952)

21. Let’s Make It Legal (1951)

22. O. Henry’s Full House (1952)

23. Some Like It Hot (1959)

    B. A. D. Reviews is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I recently watched Lady Gaga’s incredible 2025 Coachella performance, titled The Art of Personal Chaos. I am only casually interested in Gaga, mostly because of her acting and the theatricality of her persona. When she first stepped into the spotlight (I saw her first appearance on TV!), she was a very different entertainer than she is today. Her songs and videos were crudely sexual (I just read the lyrics to “Poker Face”, and I am literally shocked and appalled.), and her persona was a daily cycle through random personae. She always appeared in costume, and she promoted herself with a foregrounded shock factor. Over the years, so much has changed. The costumes remain, but they’re reserved for actual performances. She tamed her wild-girl image (supposedly after Elton John held a private intervention), embraced a wide range of musicality—especially jazz—and matured into a well-spoken adult in a world of baby celebrities shooting from the hip. Essentially, her focus has tightened while her persona has opened up.

The Art of Personal Chaos floored me with its epic theatricality, narrative structure, expansive sets and costumes, and impressive choreography and arrangements. One fan noted that it is “Wagnerian in scope,” and that is quite true. This show was a rare example of a true Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner’s term for an art made up of all the arts. Music, dance, story, fashion, sculpture, design, theatre…they are all utilized to the fullest. It was (surprisingly, to me) one of the best stage spectacles I have seen!

I suppose what drew me to watch this concert (basically a film) was what little I saw of Lady Gaga’s recent iteration, wherein she walks shakily, bent over, with a huge gnarled cane. I thought, “What is that about?” Also, this was (I read) a tighter, more operatic version of her free concert in Rio last year, which drew a record crowd of over 2 million people. Clearly, there was a lot of interest out there.

The show itself is an epic gothic pop opera about two deuling monarchs (both Gaga herself): The Mistress of Mayhem (she with the cane, in severe red or black) and The White Queen (in flowing white). The main set was a full-sized opera house (well, half of one, as with most performative spaces) with two or three storeys and dozens of arched performance spaces (think The Muppet Show opening). Attached to this, there was a very, very long causeway that led to a square surface with a screen for a floor. Gaga was buried in sand, played human chess against her other self (with a huge crew of talented dancers!), and played two different (stylized) pianos and an electric guitar between dances that often led to her audible gasping for breath into her head-mic. There was a string section in exaggerated 18th-century dress, a 360-degree keyboard, and a dress at least forty feet tall (which opened to reveal a two-storey cage full of dancers instead of the whalebone hoops one would expect). There were four titled acts and a massive finale. The songs were arranged into a mix between opera and electronica, flowing from one into the next seamlessly. There was even a keyboardist who seemed to be dipped in undried carbonite! It was hypnotically grand.

Look at this guy!!

I had only heard a few of the songs before: this was no “play the hits” affair, but a narrative told through selections of her music. This made me wonder. If the concert is a straightforward parade of greatest hits, then the recorded music is the primary text. Sometimes, an artist themself (Taylor Swift) becomes the primary text of their career. What, I wondered, was Lady Gaga’s primary text? Was it the concert itself? For some rock stars, this is indeed the case, but Gaga’s show was clearly referencing something else…something more than just her music, more than her persona, more than the experience of the audience and artist communing, and more than her music videos. All of those things were reference points, out of which the performance was constructed, but none was the main thing.

As best as I can see it, Lady Gaga’s primary text is something that we never see. It is a mythos, an intricately constructed world, from which we are told stories. This type of grand, extravagant concert is perhaps the closest we get to seeing that place, but it’s not nearly the whole. Gaga’s main work is world-building, but we can never enter the world she has built. Each album, each persona, each thematic playground is a piece drawn out of that unseen world. It is, however, the very sense that a complete world lies behind it all that proves so magnetic. It is a kind of performance art from an undiscovered country.

I have a weakness for gothic literature, and so that is partially why this spectacle delighted me so. The concept may have been simple (each person’s internal struggle between chaos and order), but it was not dealt with simplistically. There was no winner at the show’s end. The Mistress of Mayhem and The White Queen are locked forever in an embrace that can be both belligerent and conciliatory.

This is what I want from a concert—an ordering and reimaging of the music, placed in some sort of context. Other concert films that I love include Bernadette Peters at Carnegie Hall, David Byrne’s American Utopia, Stop Making Sense, Taylor Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour, and Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to L.A.

The person I feel most in tune with about the goals and practice of art criticism is Lindsay Anderson (who also has made some truly wonderful films). I have quoted him here before on the subject, but here is another excellent passage from a 1963 interview conducted by John Russell Taylor. It conveys a lot about how I envision the role of the critic and what I hope my criticism may aspire to. (I only hope that I am a less obnoxious person than Anderson was…but I also have grave doubts about that.)

One can imagine criticism so perceptive and illuminating that it can also illuminate for the artist, show him what he has been doing, and tell him truths about himself he did not see. But in practice one seems to know the faults and virtues of what one has done more clearly than the people who criticize it. Perhaps this is because critics judge too much, and interpret too little. When thinking about criticism I always recall the remark by Charlotte Brontë in her introduction to the edition of Wuthering Heights published after Emily’s death. She talked of the critics who, when the book appeared, had immediately assumed she had written it; and she mentioned one critic who did perceive the essentially original quality of the novel. A true critic, she says, who was able to interpret “the Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin of an original mind.” This, I think, conveys admirably the essential function of the critic. Judgments after all are not so very interesting: they usually tell us more about the judge than about the work. But a critic who can see something new and original (and maybe perplexing to most people as a result), and who has the intelligence and culture to be able to interpret it, to reveal its true nature—this is as valuable as it is rare.

…

I wished to affirm my belief in the dignity of criticism, for the critic should be more than a parasite. He should be a whole man just as much as anyone else; and so of course his moral and social beliefs must affect his judgments. To pretend that one can, or should, eliminate these aspects of oneself in assessing a work of art can only lead to an impoverishment of criticism.

This is the year that we’re seeing the fallout from the 95th Academy Awards, where the Best Picture of 2022 was named Everything Everywhere All At Once. At that point, the Oscars had been slowly building up to what would become that critical moment, branching out into genres and directorial visions that started to muddy the idea of an “Oscars movie.” Pe…

Read more

Recently, in my journey through Dickens’s novels, I finished The Old Curiosity Shop. Very little of the book takes place in the shop of the title, which actually disbands during the very early chapters. (This book, more than others, bears the marks of Dickens’s serialized storytelling, frequently discarding characters and ideas—and even its narrator—as …

Read more

No sheep were harmed in the making of this film. I truly suspect that no sheep were used in the making of this film. (The sheep in this picture look real, but it’s not an actual shot from the film.)

I am so sick of only seeing CGI animals on the screen! I would much rather see Babe-era talking animals. Or puppets.

The movie imagines a shepherd who reads m…

Read more

I am perpetually tinkering with my list of favorite films, but about once a year (or more), I dismantle it and rebuild it anew. Lately, the process for this overhaul has been roughly as follows. Looking through my 4-5 star ratings on Letterboxd, I note down any films that I could see adding to my list. Next, I go through my list and note which films I w…

Read more

I am an annoying film-watching partner. I demand to sit front and center so as to be fully immersed in the movie and not distracted by the real world or any people who might be moving in my line of sight. Depending on the tone of the movie, I often allow nothing in the way of whispered asides, and I functionally ignore you. (We are having parallel exper…

Read more

Here we are, twenty years after The Devil Wears Prada movie earned Meryl Streep her 14th Oscar nomination, solidified Anne Hathaway as an adult movie star, made us all fall deeply in love with Stanley Tucci, and announced the arrival of a force of nature known as Emily Blunt. Well, they’re all back—and basically sharing co-star status—in the new film, T…

Read more

Nash…

Read more

One of the strongest films of the past decade is writer/director David Lowery’s The Green Knight, in which Dev Patel’s Sir Gawain seeks to be worthy of a beautiful halo-shaped crown. Finally, Lowery is back with Mother Mary, in which Anne Hathaway plays a pop megastar whose signature look is the same sort of halo headdress. One might even say that she, …

Read more

Stephen Frears’s 1990 film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s pulp novel, The Grifters, might not show its true identity right away, but it’s a long con well worth falling into. Thompson is (in)famous as the preeminent pulp novelist of American soullessness. His is the world that has given rise to an entire genre of entertainment, from Sin City to Pulp Fiction

Read more

French director Alain Resnais currently occupies the twelfth spot on my Favorite Directors list. That may seem low, but it’s a crowded and competitive group. He is one of the best of all time. And I have finally watched all of his feature films (some of which have been near-impossible to track down)!

My concluding film was his 1993 two-movie film Smoking…

Read more