Review

Film Reviews: Three from the Online French Film Festival

February 19, 2025
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It is a shame that international film festivals cannot be made accessible to wider audiences, but the trend toward online gatherings, such as the Online French Film Festival, is a good start.

Jazz Album Review: Exactly on Time — Kenny Wheeler Legacy’s “Some Days Are Better: The Lost Scores”

February 19, 2025
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An excellent new album by the ad hoc ensemble Kenny Wheeler Legacy. It is impossible not to think of how the great trumpeter Kenny Wheeler would have sounded over these updated arrangements with such top-drawer musicians and excellent production.

Book Review: “Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry” — Into a New Clearing

February 18, 2025
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Besides giving us a multi-faceted portrait of Robert Frost that leaves the poet tantalizingly inscrutable, Adam Plunkett does what the best biographers of great writers do: send us back to the work with renewed curiosity and heightened appreciation.

Book Review: “Río Muerto” — The Abiding Strength of Humanity

February 17, 2025
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Among this novel’s merits is its powerful celebration of the will to live, dovetailed with an evocation of the love members of a family have for one another, even under the most brutal and apparently hopeless circumstances.

Book Review: “Just Beyond the Light” — Essential Heavy-Metal Lit

February 17, 2025
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There are similarities between Randall Blythe’s music and his prose; both acknowledge the inescapable turmoil, darkness, and tragedy that bedevils everyone.

Book Review: Surviving Stalin in “No Country For Love”

February 16, 2025
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In this compulsively readable novel, a Ukrainian Jewish woman does what she needs to survive in the nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic Stalin-era Soviet Union.

Visual Arts Review: “The Art of Looking” — The Evolution of Harvard’s Art History Department

February 15, 2025
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The show may be a case of inside baseball, appealing to a small group of art history majors and museum lovers. But it offers a fascinating look at innovation at one of the country’s most revered, and most traditional, colleges.

Film Review: “Captain America: Brave New World” – ‘Tis New to Thee?

February 14, 2025
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“Captain America: Brave New World,” which is loaded with potential for drama and commentary, has less weight and punch than a butterfly’s fart.

Film Review: “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” — Cheesy But Satisfying

February 14, 2025
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Yes, “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” is a cheesy, predictable rom-com. But it doesn’t try to be anything that it’s not.

Book Review: “Fine” — Lad Lit That’s Keenly Aware of the Human Condition and Its Afflictions

February 14, 2025
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John Patrick Higgins is a deft writer whose prose often displays a spare lyricism. 

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