‘Safe House’ Review: Singing a Song of Loneliness

Wearing a meadow-green T-shirt that proclaims her an Irish Princess, Grace dances with a white stuffed bunny that is her confidant. The music is Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” waltz, and it’s a clue to how Grace’s life plays out — not the ballet’s storybook ending, just the tragic parts. In this snippet of a scene near … Read more

The Artists Giving Figurative Sculpture New Life

FOR MUCH OF art history, figurative sculpture was steeped in a sense of the eternal. Ancient statues of leaders, heroes and gods tended to embody what their creators believed (or hoped) would endure forever. Now figurative sculpture reflects profound anxieties over permanence. Our bodies are bombarded by stuff — for example, the microplastic particles of … Read more

After Netflix Success, ‘Suits’ Opens Another Firm

On a January morning, attractive people in tailored attire stood in a sun-skimmed California courtroom, arguing a motion in the murder trial. “Bring the venom!” the director, Anton Cropper, said encouragingly. This was on the set of “Suits LA,” a sibling of “Suits,” the legal procedural that ran on USA for nine seasons, from 2011 … Read more

Five Free Movies to Stream Now

Maybe Big Tech hasn’t delivered on its disruptive promise for movies after all: We’ve cut our cable cords for price and convenience only to pay just as much (if not more) to jump through hoops and across platforms, with diminishing returns in quality. But there’s always good work being made. This new column, then, is … Read more

I Would Follow This Poem to Hell and Back

Here’s a poem about patience, about self-control, about the need to conserve your energy and constrain your desire. Fittingly enough, it’s a proper old-school sonnet, orderly and elegant: 14 lines of iambic pentameter, crisply punctuated, with syllables cut to measure. But like a great many sonnets — most famously the 154 written by William Shakespeare … Read more