Category: Reviews

On Object and Actor

Questioning a binary understanding of women as either object or actor, Her portrays women as both.

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Bone Tomahawk

In a filmmaking era when movies are increasingly designed, focus-tested, and audience-approved to please, “Bone Tomahawk” is strangely refreshing for refusing us our simple pleasures.

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Hallucinogen-ic

R&B is experiencing a renaissance.

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A Review

The senior thesis exhibition currently on view in the Lucas Gallery at 185 Nassau is entirely wordless.

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Dora’s Ghost

Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s most famous novel, Dora Bruder, is something like a ghost story, though not in the traditional sense. It is a ghostly story about a young man and a nation haunted by history. Modiano received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2014, the fifteenth French writer to do so after the 2008 laureate Jean- Marie Georges Le Clézio. While Le Clézio’s writing is sensual and tinted with exoticism, Modiano’s is sparse, introspective, and heav- ily autobiographical, sometimes even termed “autofiction.”

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Triumphant Melancholy

When the Antlers released Hospice in 2009 on Frenchkiss Records, the band established itself as a project of personal catharsis for its frontman, Peter Silberman. Designated a concept album, Hospice channeled Silberman’s past romantic failures into a story of two individuals confined to a cancer ward: a hospice worker and the terminally ill patient he gradually falls in love with.

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The Things We Do for Love

It is not often I get to encounter a fellow Dayton, so when I heard about a new documentary called Running Wild: The Life of Dayton O. Hyde, I was suitably intrigued. The film was to be screened on Saturday, February 8 at the Princeton Public Library, as part of the Princeton Environmental Film Festival (PEFF).

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Of Matt(yboys) & Moon(thels)

Is it Matt or Matthew?”

Nearly all my life, I have faced this question. More than a courtesy, it is a challenge, a demand: “Identify yourself.”

In my childhood, I was lost and unsure. Who am I? Am I that guy who carelessly shortens his name, soiling the greatest gift, after life, his parents have given him? Or am I that guy who insists on being called by his proper name, like some pompous Alexander or Maximilian?

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Anatomy of A Single Girl

Not long ago, Random House sent a number of free books to the Nassau Weekly in the hopes that we would exercise our considerable influence on campus to publicize and review their products. One volume in particular (a bright pink thing called Anatomy of a Single Girl) caught my eye. It wasn’t just the garish cover or the titillating title, it was—actually, no, it was mostly those things.

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Fear and Loathing on Cable

This summer I have taken it upon myself to tackle John Steinbeck’s American epic East of Eden, a modern retelling of the biblical Cain and Abel story set to the backdrop of post-Gold Rush era Northern California—that is, Steinbeck’s own backyard. Summer is, for students at least, that blessed time of intellectual freedom during which schoolwork means almost nothing to you and you are free to read, write, study, and contemplate whatever you wish.

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Orange Is the New Black

This summer, I went to prison. Well, not actually, but I did watch Netflix’s original series “Orange is the New Black,” and therefore feel as though I am something of an authority on the subject of federal penitentiary. Piper Chapman, the show’s WASPy, neurotic protagonist, has led me on a tour of prison life, providing a kind of personal “scared straight” program.

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Spring Breakers

Spring Breakers arrived in theaters last Friday only to confuse audiences around the country. The film begins practically pornographically, bare breasts splashed with beer and tan rears occupying the entire movie screen, accompanied by the aggressive sounds of Skrillex. It then flashes forward to the mundane and fictitious Kentucky College where four girls find they don’t have enough money to fund a spring break getaway to Florida.

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