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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think
Shipbreaking
Lines and line breaks are poetry’s structural units, in much the same way that timbered planks — and the gaps that must be filled between them — create a ship’s hull. Fittingly, the rapturous poems in Robin Beth Schaer’s “Shipbreaking” are fashioned from taut lines joined by tension. Nautical imagery of wind, waves and wreck…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think The Divines
‘Divines,” by French-Moroccan director Houda Benyamina, is set in the suburbs of Paris. The teenage Dounia and Maimouna know the limits of what the world will offer them and still dare to want more. A story of friendship told with the gravity of a love story, a hymn to hope and to hopelessness, the film…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Amos Oz and ‘Judas’
Even an annus horribilis can be redeemed if it contains a new Amos Oz novel. “Judas” was a quiet piece with a small ensemble roaming familiar Jerusalem streets, yet its deceptively simple structure hid multitudes. It wrestled with enormous ideas about love and loneliness, grief and treachery, presented with Oz’s characteristic mix of beauty, compassion,…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Swim Through the Darkness
“Swim Through the Darkness” by Mike Stax was easily the most moving and inspiring book I read in 2016. Stax’s biography of Craig Smith — a promising musician and songwriter who took a wrong turn at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and fell forever through the cracks of society — is a deeply…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think The Innocents
Anne Fontaine’s powerful and compelling French-Polish drama “The Innocents” is based on the little-known true story of the French Red Cross doctor Madeleine Pauliac, played by Lou de Laâge. Set in the bleak, snow-covered landscape of postwar Poland in 1945, it’s a striking film with an almost painterly quality to it as it ponders the…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think You Want It Darker
The musical year of 2016 was bookended by dark valedictories: David Bowie’s “Blackstar” and Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker.” Both Bowie and Cohen knew that their ends were near, and both passed on to the next realm just as their last brilliant works were released. Cohen’s final album — in particular its haunting title…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Transparent
Jill Soloway’s “Transparent” might be the most perfect example of a liberal, privileged bubble, but it transcends this much-discussed bubble, because every character is profoundly flawed and any hint of smugness is quickly eradicated by humor and pain. 2016’s third season offered so many memorable images and lines, but it’s the opening credits that get…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Captain Fantastic
‘Captain Fantastic” is noteworthy for its refreshing views of an authoritarian patriarch, Ben Cash (a terrific performance by Viggo Mortensen), gussied up as a forward-thinking intellectual. Dad’s political motto is “Stick It to the Man,” and he celebrates Noam Chomsky’s birthday instead of Christmas. His children are conversant in Marx, “Middlemarch” and Yo-Yo Ma, but…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Lemonade
What got me most this year, (pre-election, it must be said) was Beyoncé’s “visual album,” “Lemonade,” which chronicles a deep betraying love but is also about everything: The history of the world, being a black women in America, fathers and daughters, performance, mothers and daughters, American cities and countries and towns, violence. Alchemy. Deep, unapologetic,…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Unterzakhn
It took me a moment to appreciate Leela Corman’s brilliant graphic novel, “Unterzakhn” because it’s all things I am not: brassy, polished and containing multiple complex storylines. Leela, forgive me the review I wrote in this newspaper when I was an insecure young person. I’ve been saving Corman’s recent book — a collection of short…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think The Family Fang
A dark comedy that is at moments side-splittingly funny, “The Family Fang” zeroes in on the emotionally damaged adult children (Nicole Kidman, Jason Bateman) of two pretentious and talent-free performance artists (Maryann Plunkett and Christopher Walken). Fang Sr. is a manipulative bastard, openly contemptuous of his kids, a novelist and actress, respectively, because they are…
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