Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
fantasy
Film Commentary: Video Games — The Real Final Frontier?
“Avatar” is beautiful and otherworldly, but the film is so grounded in down-to-earth concepts that it restricts the viewer’s imagination rather than broadening it. An infinitely better and more complex recent space opera, “Mass Effect 2,” comes in the form of a video game. Is it art? Yes. By Justin Marble Over the centuries the […]
Book Review: Haruki Murakami’s “After Dark” — Dead Tired
By Bill Marx In his critically acclaimed novels and stories, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami sings of the subterranean connections between software and the supernatural. After Dark (Knopf, 191 pp, $22.95) Haruki Murakami is a hip cultural diagnostician who would like to be viewed as a melancholic poet of the postmodern condition, a writer who has […]