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Jean-Marie Straub, one of the great filmmakers of the French New Wave and one of the most secretly powerful influences in the modern cinema, died on Sunday, at the age of eighty-nine, in Rolle, Switzerland. (Rolle is the same small…

How can someone be convicted of a crime with almost no proof of his guilt and abundant evidence of his innocence? I’m faced by that question in trying to understand how my friend Frank Morrissey was found guilty of forgery…

Once the hard and lonely work of book-writing was done and the publishing machine’s publicity gears were whirring, authors hoped to get “Ettlingered.” The coinage, which for decades was common parlance in the literary world, referred to having your picture…

“Heart Valley” illustrates the simplicity of Wilf Davies’s routines. He has no Internet access, gets his news by radio, and eats the same dinner each day. Last spring, the filmmaker Christian Cargill drove roughly six hours from London to the…

“The Rings of Power,” the new and outrageously expensive prequel to J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” saga, opens slowly. Amazon, perhaps the only corporation on earth that can throw this kind of money around with ease,…

For the polymath, there is always a cardinal subject, a chief preoccupation around which all the other interests spin. For the fashion designer Virgil Abloh, the polymath of his cohort, who died on Sunday of a rare cardiac cancer, offensively…

In the first season of Terence Nance’s HBO series “Random Acts of Flyness,” from 2018, he makes use of the episodic nature of serial television to do what a narrative feature film can’t: by collaborating with other writers and directors,…

A family meal can have a certain magic. At the outset of Laura Gonçalves’s animated short “The Garbage Man,” a group of relatives gather around a table, and the conversation drifts—naturally, inevitably—to Manuel Botão, the filmmaker’s late uncle. Botão watches…

In January, 1977, while most Americans were busy watching “Roots,” seventeen thousand people convened in Lagos, Nigeria, for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC). A monthlong extravaganza that featured delegations from more than fifty…

Quite a few lovers of English literature raised a glass—specifically a Macallan single malt Scotch with a dash of water—this past April. The occasion? The centennial of the birth of the greatest comic writer of his generation, and kingfish of…