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Album Review: “Temptations 60” — A Joyful Celebration

February 1, 2022
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Temptations 60 celebrates the band’s 60th anniversary, and it strikes a careful balance between looking backward and staying grounded in the here-and-now.

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February Short Fuses – Materia Critica

February 1, 2022
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Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

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Book Review: “Thank You, Mr. Nixon” — East Meets West, Again and Again

February 1, 2022
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The author of The Resisters returns with a timely collection of stories about the connections and contradictions linking America and China.

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Book Review: “Letters to Camondo” — An Essential Testament to Jewish Memory and History

February 1, 2022
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This is an extraordinarily beautiful book, its present tense prose creating “an atmosphere of literature,” in Virginia Woolf’s words, its honest probing as illuminating as anything you will read about what it means to be Jewish.

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Electronic Art Pop Album Review: FKA twigs’ “Caprisongs” — Hypnotic Mixtape

January 31, 2022
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The format may be different, but FKA twigs remains as hypnotic as ever on her album Caprisongs.

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Film Review: “The Great Postal Heist” — Clear and Present Danger to a Great American Institution

January 31, 2022
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This effective advocacy documentary charts the 21st-century decline of a great American institution (one established in the U.S. Constitution). It’s also a wake-up call alerting us that things didn’t have to happen this way.

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Film Reviews: Sundance 2022, Dispatch #6 — Learning from the Past

January 30, 2022
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This dispatch reviews three documentaries that are very different from each other, but are all fascinating and engaging. This was an excellent year for documentaries at Sundance. I will review several more before this year’s dispatches are complete.

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Visual Arts Review: “Ways to Baffle the Wind” — Exploring Humanity and Nature at Mass MoCA

January 29, 2022
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Yto Barrada’s intent in this show is not to warn about environmental catastrophe so much as to explore where culture and the natural world meet.

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Film Reviews: Sundance 2022, Dispatch #5 — Nature, and Healing

January 29, 2022
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These three Sundance films supplied very intense viewing experiences.

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Book Review: “Call Me Cassandra” — The Beauty of Fait Accompli

January 28, 2022
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You know how the story is going to end, but it can only unfold if you take Cassandra’s hand and follow where she knows to go. Believe that she knows the way.

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