Fu Baoshi adapts to revolution The title of The Metropolitan Museum’s new Chinese painting exhibit, Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965), is misleading. The painter in question did live through the establishment of the Chinese Republic, the Sino-Japanese wars and the rise of the Communist party, but Fu is far more 
If the filmmaking team Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor wrote out their thoughts on how contemporary pop has traduced fun, warped thrills and debased energy in the art form they love, it would be a great provocative piece of criticism—although few film publications would want such a principled view of the destructive entertainment that’s routinely 
We may have been reading the wrong thing all along. Blame it on T.S. Eliot, who proclaimed Djuna Barnes’ stylistically avant-garde Nightwood equal to great Elizabethan tragedy—the novel was canonized by many in lesbian literature as a breakthrough: a lightly disguised version of Barnes’ breakup with her female lover. You can’t argue with those folks. 
Update: In Breaking Dawn, Part 1, Bella marries Edward, gives birth to a demon baby and Jacob stops moping long enough to “implant” with the infant. These predictable plot details are not spoilers; the film itself is a spoiler. All the potential of the Twilight vampire series is squandered. Part 2 may already be in the can, but 
In a healthier film culture, Garbo the Spy would make history. Its great pleasure is that it remakes history: telling the real life story of a WWII counterspy Joan Pujol Garcia through the sophisticated use of fictional film footage. It was Garcia who misled the Nazis about a planned maneuver at Calais—misdirection that facilitated the American’s D-Day landing on 
CityArts Editor Armond White addresses the current controversy between critics and Hollywood about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The issue industry-forced “embargoes” on reviews is not “inside baseball” shop talk. It effects the way movies are sold and received in the entire culture. White rips away the naivete that has confused journalists, bloggers, gossip columnists 
Pariah is such a decent film it is a shame that its title seems designed to keep people away. The “P” word title is too close to Precious, the abomination that set-back the recent cultural progress. In Pariah, debut writer-director Dee Rees tells a coming-of-age story rooted in the family and social customs of black 
Armond White looks back at the best movies that surpass and defy the year’s worst We’ve reached the point where movies are less popular than other forms of pop culture yet remain compelling—as much for what they recall about the humanities as the inhumanity they routinely deliver. Thus 2011′s year-end mania for the specious cultural 
