Keanu Reeves is aware of his celebrity status, but doesn’t take advantage of it, and he’s generous but careful with his presence.Photograph by Karwai Tang / Getty
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Naomi Fry, a staff writer at The New Yorker covering books, art, and popular culture, is a regular contributor to the weekly column Critic’s Notebook.
What we're watching, listening to, and doing this week in N.Y.C, and beyond
The Front Row
“John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum,” Reviewed: Keanu Reeves, Empty Fight Scenes, and a Paranoiac Chill
Full of empty, stakeless action, the movie succeeds less as a martial-arts spectacle than as a post-apocalyptic political drama.
By Richard Brody
Inverted
Deepfaking Orson Welles’s Mangled Masterpiece
Will an A.I. restoration of “The Magnificent Ambersons” right a historic wrong or desecrate a classic?
By Michael Schulman
Personal History
Living in Tracy Chapman’s House
Fresh out of college, we were a bunch of misfits, in a chaotic, run-down communal home, desperately trying to figure out who we were meant to be.
By Jill Lepore
The Lede
The Movie That Inspired Gregory Bovino to Join Border Patrol
Years before he led the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement effort in Minneapolis, Bovino saw the 1982 Jack Nicholson film “The Border.”
By Alexander Nazaryan
Annals of Inquiry
Why Do We Like Music?
People with musical anhedonia, a rare inability to enjoy music, are teaching scientists how the brain processes songs.
By Shayla Love
Elements
Is the Rat War Over?
In New York, a rat czar and new methods have brought down complaints. We may even be ready to appreciate the creatures.
By Rivka Galchen
Page-Turner
The Hidden History of Native American Enslavement
Indigenous slavery, which lasted for centuries, has gone by many names. A new public history project wants us to see it for what it was.
By Geraldo Cadava
Q. & A.
What a “Melania” Cinematographer Hoped to Accomplish
Dante Spinotti has had a legendary Hollywood career. Why is he making propaganda for the Trump family?
By Isaac Chotiner
The Front Row
Why Frederick Wiseman Was the Greatest Documentary Filmmaker Ever
In nearly sixty years of nonfiction filmmaking, Wiseman passionately probed the nodal points of political and social power and connected them in a cinematic universe of his own.
By Richard Brody
The Art World
Peter Strausfeld, the Movie-Poster Master
An exhibition in New York celebrates the work Strausfeld made for a cinema in London over the course of more than thirty years—designs of graphic confidence that were clean, strong, and scornful of embellishment.
By Anthony Lane