The Oscars are tonight, and, as a kind of cheat sheet, we’ve got a slate of pieces about some of the nominated films and the artists behind them.
Sign up for Classics, a twice-weekly newsletter featuring notable pieces from the past.
In “An Earthier, Sweatier ‘West Side Story,’ ” Anthony Lane writes about Steven Spielberg’s reimagining of the work of Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim. (“Spielberg and his screenwriter, Tony Kushner, have brought us to Robert Moses’s promised land.”) In “The Enduring Appeal of ‘Dune’ as an Adolescent Power Fantasy,” Ed Park examines Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction epic. Richard Brody critiques two genre films: “CODA” and “Nightmare Alley.” In “Kenneth Branagh’s Airbrushed ‘Belfast,’ ” Lane wrestles with the sentimentality of Branagh’s coming-of-age film, which is set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Finally, in “Jane Campion’s Gothic Vision of Rural Queerness in ‘The Power of the Dog,’ ” Brandon Taylor considers the melancholia of Campion’s twist on the classic Western. A prediction? Jane Campion goes home happy.
—David Remnick
