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Read 5 days ago and current, but nothing has been published for 14 months.
There are cinematic misfires, and then there is The Beatniks, a film so wildly off-target it could only have been named during a caffeine crash in a marketing meeting. As a teensploitation crime flick marketed to the tambourine-beating, beret-wearing pseudo-intellectuals of Eisenhower-era America, it has precisely nothing to do with beatniks. No jazz poetry. No, Ginsberg. Not even a…
This striking and unsentimental painting by Gustave Doré presents a rugged family on the margins—literally and figuratively. Under a brilliant, almost jarring blue sky, we see a woman clutching her child, flanked by two armed men (one alert, one pretending to nap), and two dogs that appear to be auditioning for the role of “nervous lookout #3.” They’re set against a brittle, sun-blasted hillside…
In the grand cinematic pantheon of “giant animal attacks coastal real estate scam,” films—a surprisingly robust genre in the 1970s— Empire of the Ants scurries in as neither the worst nor the best, but certainly among the most radioactive. Directed, written, and special-effected (for better or worse) by B-movie monarch Bert I. Gordon, this 1977 offering hurls Joan Collins into the Everglades with…
If anyone ever accused 19th-century French academic painting of being stiff, they hadn’t met Battle of the Centaurs and the Lapiths, a canvas so kinetic it practically throws a punch. Painted in 1852 by William-Adolphe Bouguereau during his student tenure at the French Academy in Rome, this explosive scene of mythological chaos is as much a showcase of anatomical bravura as it is of classical…
Ah, the 1977 Island of Dr. Moreau, a film where Burt Lancaster plays God, Michael York plays confused, and Barbara Carrera plays sexy-cat-woman-with-existential-crisis. It’s a cinematic jungle cruise through sci-fi, philosophy, and ’70s body hair, wrapped in layers of latex and dubious decisions. It’s not bad exactly, it’s just…well, it’s what happens when your movie about hybrid animal people has…
Let’s get something out of the way up front: if tulle had a patron saint, it would be this woman. Portrait of Lydia Schbelsky, Baroness Staël von Holstein is less a painting than a love letter to chiffon, froth, and the Victorian fantasy that women were spun from mist and duty. Here sits Lydia, nobility incarnate, in a dress so diaphanous it might’ve required its own scaffolding. She gazes…
Let’s set the stage: it’s 1911, you’re wearing a tweed overcoat two sizes too big, and the man solving murders with pastoral charm is not a Scotland Yard inspector or a cocaine-fueled violinist, but a short, round-faced priest wielding an umbrella and the psychological insight of a seasoned shrink. The Innocence of Father Brown is the literary equivalent of inviting Sherlock Holmes to afternoon…
Alfred Stevens’ Woman in the Studio (ca. 1862–65) is many things at once: a portrait, a performance, a quiet revolution wrapped in velvet and brocade. Painted with all the polish of a Dutch master armed with a Parisian fashion magazine, this exquisitely staged scene offers us a woman seated, enrobed in textiles that could intimidate a drapery department, and lost in thought. But don’t be fooled,…
There’s something oddly satisfying about listening to a legendary album and thinking, “Really? This is what turned the indie rock world inside out?” That, in a nutshell, was my experience revisiting Is This It , the Strokes’ 2001 debut that critics still treat like it cured polio. For me, it was less a seismic rock event and more a tinny jangle of detached coolness dressed up as minimalist genius.…
Giovanni Boldini (1842–1931) didn’t just paint women—he whirled them into being. A dandy with a loaded brush and an eye for elegance, Boldini became the toast of Belle Époque Paris, painting duchesses, actresses, and heiresses as though they’d just danced out of a champagne dream. Italian by birth, French by acclaim, and globally in demand, he was a portraitist of paradox: fastidious yet fluid,…
