Love & Friendship ★★ Now playingWhit Stillman’s latest, Love & Friendship, finds the director treading new territory in a period adaptation of a Jane Austen short epistolary novel, Lady Susan. Kate Beckinsale plays the cunning, eponymous lady, with Chloë Sevigny as her meek American sidekick, Alicia Johnson. It’s an intertextual echo of their 1998 roles […]
Laura Jaramillo
Bio: Durham's Laura Jaramillo is a poet and film scholar pursuing her doctoral studies at Duke University.Twitter: http://twitter.com/@mtrlgrrrl
Posted inFilm & Television
Film Review: Christian Movie Miracles From Heaven Goes Where Secular Hollywood Won’t
MIRACLES FROM HEAVEN Opening Wednesday, March 16 I confess I had Miracles From Heaven pegged as another anti-science salvo from the Christian-cinema juggernaut (see also God’s Not Dead and Heaven Is For Real). After all, the film’s trailer, which gives away its entire plot, emphasizes that miracles can achieve what science cannot. I was interested […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Movie Review: Good Intentions Pave Over Murky Ethics in A War
A WAR Opening Friday Tobias Lindholm’s Oscar-nominated A War provides a measured account of its subject’s horrors, if such a thing is possible. Claus Pedersen (Pilou Asbaek) is a Danish soldier stationed in Afghanistan on a mission to eradicate the Taliban and rebuild local villages. The film captures the bifurcated nature of wartime: a daily […]
Posted inCulture
Toilet humor meets family values in Sisters, the new comedy starring Amy Poehler and Tina Fey
Sisters Now playingSisters stars Amy Poehler and Tina Fey as Maura and Kate Ellis, terminally immature siblings whose empty-nester parents decide to finally sell their childhood home. Poehler sweetly plays the straight woman to Fey’s not-totally-believable middle-aged lady gone wild. It’s a completely competent comedy that occasionally hits some very funny notes, though it mostly […]
Posted inCulture
Rebranded as Little Corner, Duke’s excellent poetry series escapes the confines of campus
Little Corner Reading Series: Bhanu Kapil and Paul Singleton III Saturday, Nov. 21, 8 p.m. The Shed 807 E. Main St., Durham www.shedjazz.com Duke University has long been a hub for weird, interesting poetry—if you knew how to find it. Its poetry reading series, formerly known as Minor American and later as Manic Caravan, has […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Two sex addicts give chastity a try in Sleeping With Other People
SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE Director Leslye Headland’s Sleeping With Other People is a romantic comedy that falls short of the charming sexual frankness it purports to offer. Jake (Jason Sudeikis) and Lainey (Alison Brie) are former college lovers reunited at a recovery group for sex addicts. Jake is a classic womanizer, while Lainey is stuck […]
Posted inArt
In Blue Fasa, Duke poet Nathaniel Mackey defends ancient bonds between poetry and music
BLUE FASA by Nathaniel Mackey New Directions, 160 pp. Blue Fasa, the latest book by Duke University Creative Writing Professor Nathaniel Mackey, is a lyrical voyage through an epic love story. Yet this epic is but a fragment of an even vaster one, “Song of the Andoumboulou,” a multi-volume poem that began with the National […]
Posted inCulture
Movie review: Iris Apfel is fascinating, but Albert Maysles’ Iris is a mixed bag
Iris ★★★ Now playing The late Albert Maysles’ documentary Iris, which is getting a local theatrical release after screening at Full Frame, captures the daily life of the eponymous Iris Apfel as she goes about her business as an international style icon. Apfel, an interior designer, founded the rare-textile company Old World Weavers before becoming […]
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Wim Wenders celebrates the influential yet troubling photojournalism of Sebastião Salgado in The Salt of the Earth
The Salt of the Earth Opening Friday Wim Wenders’ documentary The Salt of the Earth follows the storied career of Brazilian photo-documentarian Sebastião Salgado, who produced some of the most iconic still images of the ’90s, from emaciated children in Ethiopia to oil fires in Kuwait. Wenders, who co-directs with Salgado’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, […]
Posted inCulture
Movie review: Noah Baumbach’s knack for mixing verbose wit and family drama falters in While We’re Young
While We’re Young★★ Now playing Director Noah Baumbach’s eighth film, While We’re Young, serves up his signature existential crises of the neurotic and monied. Ben Stiller stars as Josh, a film teacher with a middling career and an eight-years unfinished documentary. Josh and his wife, Cornelia (Naomi Watts), are cruising into middle-age and beginning to […]