There’s a moment in “The Last Waltz” that comes at about the 34 minute and 53 second mark, at the onset of the last chorus in Neil Young’s performance of “Helpless,” which a friend of mine once singled out, when we were arguing the film’s best scenes, as a jib door to transcendence. He ...
“But perhaps I am asking the question the wrong way around,” Zadie Smith writes at one point in her essay “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” which can be found in her new collection, “Dead and Alive.” It’s a typically Smithian line: an expression of self-doubt signalling the ...
In retrospect, it makes peculiar sense that, of all contemporary American directors, Paul Thomas Anderson would prove best-equipped to make the decade’s first great “Movie About Our Times.” The cokey, affecting mania of his early films (“Magnolia,” “Boogie Nights”); the strange, libidinal ...
