Geoffrey O’Brien

Magic from Elsewhere

The best of British postwar cinema portrays a country in the aftermath of catastrophe and uncertain about its future.

The Escape Artists

Mason Bates’s operatic adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay condenses the encyclopedic novel into a story about two outsiders caught between the harsh reality of World War II and their success as creators of a comic book superhero.

Prospero on the Run

Eddying Toward Doom

Any adaptation of Moby-Dick must pick and choose from the novel’s many themes and tones; Jake Heggie’s opera tends toward a frequency attuned to sorrow.

Living Wide

Foster Hirsch’s Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is an implicit memoir, revisiting his experience of a staggering array of films and the world in which they emerged.

Furious Stasis

Verdi’s sprawling opera La Forza del Destino draws its power from asymmetry, arbitrary juxtapositions, and extreme situations.

A Craving for Crime

Perhaps only after a lifetime of immersion in crime fiction can one begin to wonder what all those stories have really imparted.

Gorging on the Act of Looking

A series at Film Forum recovers the great 3-D wave of 1953 and the new frontiers of perception it promised.

Lope Lives!

A rare new production of Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna brings home the play’s sense of threatened violence and constant danger. 

Joe Brainard’s Communal Intimacy

While Brainard’s recurring subject was himself, he somehow kept himself at a distance, an object in a world of other bodies.

Keep Your Eye on the Kid

Buster Keaton made his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of existence in ways baffling to those among whom he found himself.

Schemes Gone Awry

Richard Wilbur’s translations of Molière, now in the Library of America, have a fluency that goes beyond meter and rhyme to encompass textures of speech and movements of thought.

Verdi’s Decentered Epic

The six principal characters of Don Carlos grasp at separate ends, but nothing is finally to be attained.

Notes from Underground

Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s new opera recasts the Orphic myth with Eurydice as the central character.

‘Magic Sayings by the Thousands’

At the heart of the Kalevala is the shamanistic power of words to transform, lead astray, destroy, create, or bring back to life.

Hitler in Antarctica

A historian of the Third Reich traces the processes by which history is not simply distorted but replaced by a fantastic parallel version.

Becoming the Nightmare

A Timon for Our Time

This production of Timon of Athens mounted by Theatre for a New Audience is described in the program as taking place “sometime in the near future,” but its opening is very much of the present gilded age.

Back on Catfish Row

What is striking about Porgy and Bess in performance is how much freedom Gershwin’s music allows for the exploration of character. It gives space for unanticipated revelation, just as it allows a flexibility of approach.

There’s No Place Like Home