Matt Hanson
Martin Scorsese’s feverish New York classic remains a master class in urban atmosphere and subjective filmmaking—and a chilling study of how alienation curdles into violent fantasy.
Apple TV’s reboot leans into slow-burn menace over Scorsese-style excess, with Javier Bardem channeling the original film’s unnerving restraint.
A new collection of Harold Bloom’s letters reveals a critic who found the heights of Western literature far more inviting than the “drab” reality of a Vermont forest.
I was surprised by how smoothly each book went down, with a little tingle of acidic satire lingering on the palate.
By Matt Hanson There’s an enticingly primeval quality to the way bluesmen Ryan Lee Crosby and Jimmy “Duck” Holmes play off of one another. Willie Dixon once said that “the blues are the roots, the other musics are the fruits.” We all know by now how plenty of world-famous bands have harvested those influences. So…
Film noir’s penetrating, knowing diagnosis of, and response to, corruption and venality prepares us for the dank turpitude that lurks in places both highfalutin and hidden.
Let’s look at a fresh crop of collections by poets who are either born and raised or have made their homes in NOLA, stopping to admire the architecture and the scope, the heft and the breadth of their lines.
American darkness is now up front and personal. “Holland”‘s stale moves miss where we are now — disaster isn’t hidden, it is in clear view.
One thing, among others, that sets Jason Isbell apart from his country scene contemporaries is that he isn’t afraid to break the all-American code of manly stoicism.
Arts Commentary: The Last Laugh — Stephen Colbert, Comedy, and Cultural Resistance
How Stephen Colbert’s late-night run became a casualty of corporate power, political retaliation, and the thin skin of America’s oligarch class.
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