Arts

We're Gonna Need A Wider Lens: Matt Smith plays photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in a new biopic.

Arts

'Mapplethorpe': A Transgressive Artist Gets An Aggressively Dull Biopic

5:01pm February 28, 2019

by Andrew Lapin

A bored-seeming Matt Smith plays the famous — and famously provocative — photographer in a plodding film that too-dutifully ticks familiar scenes off the Great Artist Biopic checklist.

Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Greta (Isabelle Huppert) spill the tea in Neil Jordan's Greta.

Arts

In 'Greta,' A Magnetic Isabelle Huppert Plays A Deadly Game of Chat-And-Mouse

5:00pm February 28, 2019

by Kyle Turner

A young woman (Chloë Grace Moretz) befriends a mysterious older woman (Huppert) in Neil Jordan's weird thriller. As extreme as Greta gets, Huppert "finds careful nuances within the bonkers."

Franz Rogowski plays a man who flees to Marseilles and finds himself stuck there in the film Transit.

Arts

In 'Transit,' A Man Fleeing Fascists Gets Caught In A Web Of Mistaken Identity

5:00pm February 28, 2019

by Scott Tobias

German director Christian Petzold adapts a 1944 Holocaust novel by setting it in the modern day. The result is a haunting and beguiling narrative of 21st-century displacement.

Arts

Documentary 'Apollo 11' Retells History With Wide Eyes - And A Wider Perspective

5:00pm February 28, 2019

by Monica Castillo

Newly restored footage of the historic 1969 moonshot widens the focus to include the hundreds of men and women who made the mission possible.

Red Shoes, Brown Acid: Selva (Sofia Boutella) and her troupe have a bad night after their sangria is laced with LSD in Gaspar Noé's Climax.

Arts

When Dancers Trip: Gaspar Noé Stages A Visceral But Vacuous Freakout In 'Climax'

5:00pm February 28, 2019

by Mark Jenkins

A French dance troupe drinks sangria spiked with LSD and descends into carnal violence in a film that turns into "just another Noé freakout, familiar in tone and stylistic tics."

Arts

'Transit' Offers An Extraordinary Vision Of Nazi-Occupied France

1:30pm February 28, 2019

by Justin Chang

A new film by German director Christian Petzold is set in a suspended-in-time version of the present. Critic Justin Chang calls it "a piercingly sad lament for the lost and forgotten souls of Europe."

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Books
Arts

Women Show The Faces Of War In 'The Huntress'

10:00am February 28, 2019

by Bethanne Patrick

Kate Quinn's new thriller puts women's experiences front and center in the story of a former Soviet "Night Witch" pilot chasing down an escaped Nazi known as The Huntress in the years after the war.

We Set the Dark on Fire, by Tehlor Kay Mejia

Books
Arts

'We Set The Dark On Fire' Burns Bright

7:00am February 28, 2019

by Caitlyn Paxson

Tehlor Kay Mejia's debut novel We Set the Dark on Fire is set at a posh girls' school in a dystopian world where the students are being trained for lives as political consorts to powerful men.

Arts

Local Designer Brings Fashion Brand For Social Change To Paris

6:56am February 28, 2019

by David Ford

A local woman is showcasing her work at Paris Fashion Week, and she's raising awareness about domestic violence at the same time.

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Books
Arts

When 'Everything' Is Changing, Stories Have A Role To Play

10:00am February 27, 2019

by Jason Sheehan

The editors of this new anthology — drawn from a story contest run by Arizona State University — argue that stories are as necessary as policy and technology in the fight against climate change.