Arts Fuse critics select the best in film, dance, visual art, theater, music, and author events for the coming weeks.
Betsy Sherman
Film Review: “Her Smell” — Fiddling with Our Viscera
Her Smell is funny-terrifying, alluring-repulsive, moving-disturbing, era-capturing and timeless.
Film Review: “Damaged Lives” — Improbably Poetic
Even an imperfect work-for-hire like Damaged Lives can show the touch of an artist.
Film Review: At Harvard Film Archive –“The Complete Luchino Visconti”
Luchino Visconti made theatrically tinged movies driven by music, indebted to painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature—he accomplished, dare I say, a fusion of the arts.
Arts Appreciation — Jerry Lewis, A Comic Actor of Glorious Contradictions
We’re losing Lewis’s generation of Depression-bred, Borscht Belt-weaned entertainers with their un-ironic neediness for laughs and their canny way of getting them.
Film Review: “Landline” — A Compelling Comedy-With-Drama
Landline is a textured, often funny and subtly acted portrait of a family experiencing rumblings set off by sexual affairs.
Film Review: “Democracy Through the Looking Glass” — Take a Good Look
The interviewees sound warnings about how we have self-sorted, online and in the real world, into echo-chamber communities of like-minded people.
Film Review: “The Little Hours” — What the Donkey Sees
A romp in and around a centuries-old Italian convent, acting out a 14th-century story using contemporary American idiom and attitude.
Film Review: The Sublimely Refined Touch of Ernst Lubitsch
In Trouble in Paradise, Lubitsch makes us feel complicit in the best of ways; he makes us feel clever.
Film Review: Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game” — Top o’ the canon, Ma!
The Complete Jean Renoir — a definitive retrospective of films by the greatest of all directors.