Adam Thirlwell

Rotten in Denmark

Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom is a soap opera about a hospital where the doctors aren’t good-looking or vibrating with noble sentiment but generally corrupt or insane.

A Sternly Witty Sensualist

Karl Lagerfeld used reference and precise technique to elevate decoration to the level of a principle.

The Trouble with Truth

Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga is his latest variation on the idea that humans live on an edge, a border beyond which life can be emptied of all meaning.

House of Delft

In a recreated eighteenth-century home in London’s East End, the ceramicist Simon Pettet and his partner Dennis Severs created a world both elegant and deliriously contemporary. 

A Horse’s Remorse

The most accurate portrait of contemporary malaise might be a cartoon that stars an asshole sublebrity horse.

Lunches in the Maelstrom

An Explosion of Pure Fact

In ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ Döblin was following his basic crazed principle: every element of a novel should be pursued further than it had been before.

Imaginary Conspiracies

Small-Town Noir

‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ and the enigma of David Lynch

The Romanian New Wave

Cristian Mungiu’s insouciant naturalism is what places him in what’s become known as the Romanian New Wave—and his latest, Graduation, demonstrates how Mungiu has refined his explorations in a hybrid form: melodrama filmed with naturalistic technique.

Tennis, Anyone?

Filming Many Worlds

One way of beginning to love the work of the filmmaker Raúl Ruiz is to do some gentle arithmetic. Ruiz, who was born in Chile in 1941, made more than one hundred films—an average year for him, therefore, involved making two or three movies.

Unserious Austen

Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is a Jane Austen novel transformed into cinema, but it’s also a film that has allowed itself to be contaminated by literature. And that is the rarer, and greater, achievement.

Gomes's Impossible Movie

Director Miguel Gomes has always enjoyed combining two separate elements in a single film, and in Arabian Nights this technique is cosmically expanded.

Devaluing the Dirty War

Alan Pauls, “one of the best living Latin American writers,” according to Roberto Bolaño, has a new novel out—*A History of Money* is a desolate, delighted history of our impermanent valuations.

Dancing Mrs. Dalloway

Should a ballet be about something? Wayne McGregor’s new ballet, Woolf Works, offers one way of thinking about this constant conundrum for the art of ballet.

Ulysses: Still a Scandal

The novelosaurus of the future

The Giant Slightness of Being

Louis CK in Double Vision

Tomorrow Night represents Louis CK’s provenance. It makes the sofa-bound viewer consider a constant artistic problem: How does a voice become a voice?

When the Devil Danced in Hungary

László Krasznahorkai’s ‘Satantango’