PFBNOW ADVENTURES!

 

  Anthony Lane attends the 39th annual Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna, where movie buffs can see hundreds of films that have been forgotten by studios, or damaged by time.    

 

 

 

 

 

  In the 1980s, the photographer Jamel Shabazz would walk the streets of his native New York with his camera, photographing young Black and brown people. He took their pictures, arranged to share a copy with them, and kept it moving. “I don’t want anything in return,” he recalls telling his subjects. “Just going to record this moment in time ’cause I see your greatness.” Twenty years later, these images of carefree optimism feel distant, Shabazz says.

  The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s work—the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival, at Bard College—is marked by curt themes, darting rhythms, tangy harmonies, and glittering textures.     Bohuslav Martinů Is One of Music’s Great Chameleons. The Czech composer energetically explored form after form.

 

  The Italian photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin left behind an archive of more than two million stills, constituting one large portrait of Italy’s postwar era. “I’m not an artist,” he liked to say. “I’m just a witness of what I see.”

 

  The ideal applicant is dynamic and creative, with a proven track record of innovation and a face that looks nothing like yours. Find out what else the leading employer in your chosen field is looking for in a candidate.    

  People experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” researchers say.

  In 2019, the telecommunications magnate Patrick Drahi bought Sotheby’s. Since then, the auction house has assumed a new, unstable identity: as both the billionaire’s indulgence and the subject of his latest corporate experiment.

  In 1971, Marvin Gaye released what many consider to be his masterwork, “What’s Going On?” By November of the same year, Sly Stone, who died this week, seemed to pose an answer: “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.” The idealism of the 60s was dead, and with its death came the harsh realities of the new moment: political assassinations, expanded police violence, a shifting civil-rights movement, and a sense of disillusionment that seemed to haunt Stone as he searched for a purpose beyond hippie-culture stardom. The lyrics on “Riot” were not necessarily pessimistic, and they were not all explicitly political, but they were tinged with a kind of cynicism that seemed to be overtaking the country. “It would be easy to draw parallels with our current political moment,” Hanif Abdurraqib writes. “It would be easy to tell you that I had the N.B.A. Finals on my television the other night but hardly watched the first half because I was frantically scrolling the internet, trying to keep track of the re...

  In Oliver Hermanus’s period drama, “The History of Sound,” Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor play music lovers whose passions prove less tempestuous than isolating. In the film, set during and after the First World War, passion is an intensely private thing, and in more ways than you might expect. “There’s little sense of hesitation, danger, or risk, which is initially refreshing; you sense that Hermanus wants his characters to live and love, at least in the moment, without fear,” writes Justin Chang. “But the romance also proceeds with a curious lack of sensual discovery and enveloping excitement—and certainly none of the fireworks that attended O’Connor’s work in ‘God’s Own Country’ or Mescal’s performance in ‘All of Us Strangers,’ to name two gay romances of wrenching, lingering emotional power.” Read Chang’s review of the film.

 

  In the course of the past 15 years, and seemingly by accident, “The Great British Bake Off” has become one of the most popular shows on TV. In its best years, “Bake Off” has drawn more British viewers than “Downton Abbey,” “Sherlock,” and even Prince Phillip’s funeral. In the streaming era, “Bake Off” is the standard-setter for ambiently watchable TV; a generation of half-watchers turns to it for its gently sedative properties. Meanwhile, bakers watch it for the craft, thinking that maybe next year they’ll apply. Ruby Tandoh was one of those bakers. She sent in her application in early 2013, attaching photos of Viennese whirls, black-currant tarts, and a drum-size brioche à tête. At the very end of the audition process, Tandoh was sent to a psychotherapist, where she remembers crying for half the session, “constitutionally incapable of playing it cool.” That’s possibly why, Tandoh muses, a couple of months later, she was on the show. Tandoh takes us inside the tent and reflects o...

 

  “A movie star is someone about whom the camera’s X-ray-like stare reveals an entire inner universe,” Richard Brody wrote, in 2017. A collection of photographs taken of actors at the Twentieth Century Fox studio documents the wardrobe, makeup, and other styling that transform actors into “mannequins of themselves.”  Such images, like this one of Doris Day on the set of “Caprice,” in 1967, stand in contrast to publicity stills; they were intended for internal use only, to insure actors’ appearances were kept consistent across shoots. See more of the behind-the-scenes shots.

  “Chloe consistently came back with the clearest vision.” In a new conversation with David Remnick, Anna Wintour, who has been the editor-in-chief of American Vogue for the past 37 years, discusses why she named Chloe Malle as her successor. Listen to the full conversation on the latest episode.

  Japan’s chief exports these days are cultural products: video games, anime, manga, music, and movies. The government recently announced plans to make content production a pillar of the country’s economic growth in the 2030s and beyond. Shōnen manga is a cornerstone of that vision, and Weekly Shōnen Jump is the most popular magazine publishing it. Much as Marvel Comics revived its flagging fortunes by creating the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jump continues to thrive, in part because of the rise of anime as a fixture of global youth culture. Popular series are often licensed to animation companies, which turn them into anime that are streamed around the world. The books promote the shows, and vice versa; a hit series can send serialized manga rocketing up the best-seller lists, making the artist, and the publication, large sums of money.

  What will it mean for culture when the live television band, something that has been an American institution for 70 years, goes extinct? The end of the late night band. 

 

  A filmmaker who wanted to make a politically contentious movie couldn’t do much better than to set it in mid-2020. But the true politics of Ari Aster’s “Eddington” are sexual politics, Richard Brody writes.

  The celebrity children’s book industry is on a roll. The pandemic and post-pandemic years have seen a spike in children’s books from familiar faces—Serena Williams, Channing Tatum, John Cena, Hoda Kotb, Sonia Sotomayor, and Bette Midler, to name a few—that “have infiltrated bedroom bookshelves like a pack of moralistic hobgoblins,” Sloane Crosley writes.

  In the course of the past 15 years, and seemingly by accident, “The Great British Bake Off” has become one of the most popular shows on TV. In its best years, “Bake Off” has drawn more British viewers than “Downton Abbey,” “Sherlock,” and even Prince Phillip’s funeral. In the streaming era, “Bake Off” is the standard-setter for ambiently watchable TV; a generation of half-watchers turns to it for its gently sedative properties. Meanwhile, bakers watch it for the craft, thinking that maybe next year they’ll apply.

  The speed with which children embrace humor suggests that it is fundamental to human nature, Joshua Rothman writes. “We laugh, therefore we are.”