Nominated for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism
“The good news for movie fans is that Spike Lee’s rousing BlacKkKlansman, the winner of this year’s Oscar for Adapted Screenplay, is his most fluid…” continue reading
“As rapturously stylized and romantic as an urban Romeo and Juliet, streaked with social clashes and yearning, Barry Jenkins’s soulful adaptation of James Baldwin’s…” continue reading
“When Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine, a country headliner who’s “faded as his jeans,” and Lady Gaga’s working-class Ally (a fed-up waitress and fledgling singer-songwriter who…” continue reading
“Rather than offering standard gore and merely giving us the willies, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Ryan Murphy’s second installment of American Crime Story…” continue reading
“I’ve finally caught up with Hulu’s spectacular The Handmaid’s Tale, just in time for its unsettling second season. What seemed far-fetched in 1985, when Margaret Atwood’s…” continue reading
“The Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s rule-defying female leads and leitmotifs (defiance, forbidden love, and obstructed mourning) are so consistent that his last three films…” continue reading
“Nobody writes better about the obsessive nature of desire, about head-over-heels infatuation, than Egyptian expat André Aciman. I savored his latest book, Enigma Variations…” continue reading
“The more I’ve been following the #MeToo movement, with its dismaying, even shocking revelations about the ubiquity of harassment…” continue reading
“The underdog Best Picture triumph at the 2017 Oscars of Barry Jenkins’s deeply affecting Moonlight, which already feels like a contemporary classic…” continue reading
“If you’re looking this summer to get a firmer grasp of African-American life and culture, these four intensely dynamic, wide-ranging books, enriched by vital…” continue reading
“Gregory Pardlo is a poet of joyous variety and wonder. It’s clear from the lively and anthem-like opening poem, “Written By Himself,” in his Pulitzer Prize-winning…” continue reading
“My mother Isabel, a very light-skinned African American, once told me of a lunch stand she happily frequented as a 50s-era teenager in her North Carolina Piedmont town.” continue reading
“Just as it was Phillis Wheatley’s and Frederick Douglass’ task to limn the dream of freedom with their whole beings and to move toward it, so it is our task…” continue reading
“Sometimes the world feels weighty to us, like Atlas’ burden, sometimes almost lark-light, unbearably sweet; Basho, the peripatetic 17th century Japanese poet…” continue reading
CYRUS CASSELLS 