Style
Quick, Affordable Sushi That’s Still a Cut Above
At a certain level of execution, sushi is very much an art of marginal differences: the precise angle to which one chef might hone the blade of his knife,...
Living in the Shadow of an American Election
A feeling of impending doom hovers over many of Nasseri’s pictures. On the first day of the road trip, which happened to fall on the Fourth of July, Nasseri...
“Conclave” Is a Mild Thriller About a Tense Papal Election
A reformist Pope who boldly leads the Catholic Church into controversial changes should be played by an actor of commanding presence. In “Conclave,” there is such a Pope—he’s seen...
Stars Collide in “Sunset Blvd.” and “Romeo + Juliet”
In Billy Wilder’s ur-camp masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard,” from 1950, Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, an aging grande dame of silent film, who slides from self-regarding eccentricity into homicidal delusion....
“Blitz” Uses Classical Storytelling to Advance a Radical Vision of War
Early on in “Blitz,” Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), a London factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan), aboard a train. Rather, George puts himself aboard; he twists...
James Graham Thinks We’re in a Crisis of Storytelling
The brutalist Royal National Theatre building, which sits aggressively on the south side of the River Thames, in London, is a “love it or loudly despise it” kind of...
Telling the Story of Ethiopia’s Red Terror Through a Family Artifact
“I often find a lot of documentaries and films especially pertaining to war and/or Africa, to be shrouded with a bleakness and hopelessness,” the filmmaker Ruth Hunduma says. “That...
The Megachurch That Tried to Confront Racism
When it comes to Christianity, scale often matters: the larger the data set, the worse the outlook on any number of axes, from membership to charitable giving, while the...
