RaveThe New YorkerThis fine-grained and deeply researched unfolding of Eastwood’s life and career subtly tweaks familiar biographical formulas in a way that parallels what Eastwood has done with typical Hollywood practices, to reveal fascinating truths about Eastwood’s art, and about cinema itself ... Levy maintains chronology with a shrewd interweaving of projects; cutting back and forth between movies in production and ones in release ... Absorbing.
RaveThe New YorkerAs jubilantly overstuffed as its subtitle. The book is a startlingly slow read—and I say that with unbridled enthusiasm. I can’t remember the last book I’ve read that contained so much information so tightly packed, or in which the distillation of vast research offered such relentless ricochets of association, connection, and allusion. Although its meld of journalistic detective work, insightful analysis, and keen critical judgment might suggest a straightforward nonfiction account, it’s a work of obsession and devotion that finds a distinctive and original form—a hectic informational voracity—for its passionate archivism ... The last line of Everything Is Now—forgive my spoiler—in which he refers to \'this book, which I consider a memoir, although not mine,\' is a keenly self-conscious, poetic, and philosophical encapsulation of the paradoxically personal yet impersonal ambition energizing the project ... Something of a citational history, bringing to life the wild artistic ferment of the times, along with many of the era’s vital voices ... The characters who inhabit Everything Is Now make for an extraordinary cast. After reading the book, it’s as if one had been all over town all decade long, with a dazzling array of companions, and readers are likely to come away from the kaleidoscopic whirl with their own highlights and affinities ... Hoberman pays due attention to the major national and international events that influenced New York’s avant-garde—civil rights, the Vietnam War, political assassinations—and also to historic doings within the city, such as feminist activism and the Stonewall uprising. But he places particular emphasis on power at the local level and, most of all, on its prime physical manifestation: policing ... Eminently quotable ... Brings a phantasmagorical roster of personalities to the fore—some unheralded, others coterie famous, and some world-historical famous—and traces connections that proved to have mighty consequences ... One of Hoberman’s most ingenious touches is to emphasize urban specifics: he cites throughout exact street addresses where artists lived and worked, where performances and shows and screenings were held.
Carrie Courogen
RaveThe New YorkerA deeply researched, psychologically astute new biography of May by Carrie Courogen...the author sees continuities and patterns in a career that is unified, above all, by the force of May’s character. Courogen also assesses May’s fortunes in the light of social history ... The book is written with a brash literary verve that feels authentic to its subject, and it does justice both to May’s mighty artistry and to the complex fabric of her life, linking them persuasively while resisting facile correlations between her personal concerns and her blazing inspirations ... The biography’s psychological acuity is all the more remarkable given May’s long-standing reluctance to speak about her life, or to speak to the press at all. Courogen develops a fine-grained and poignant view of an artist who has spent her adult years running from her background with a refugee’s desperation while also covering her tracks in order to keep her traumas away from the prurient and hypercritical gaze of the media and the public.
Serge Daney tr. Christine Pichini
PositiveThe New Yorker... it is his discussion of the real-world implications of movies that gives his naturally abstract inclinations a spark of life, investing his criticism with a passionate energy and a propulsive sense of purpose. To put it bluntly, it takes a little while for the book to get good ... As for French cinema, Daney writes incisively about the revanchist politics of nineteen-seventies France and the resulting decadence of French cinema ... Where most critics appear to formulate responses to the movies they see, Daney formulates ideas so powerful that the movies he sees seem made to embody them. Yet there was a paradox to his immense creative force; namely, its oddly impersonal quality. Daney repudiated the all-too-familiar adjective soup that serves the advertising of movies, a state of affairs that he commented on trenchantly, in a 1974 meditation on What is film criticism? But in doing so he seemed to resist subjectivity altogether, writing as if his evaluation of movies materialized not from any emotional response at all but from their quasi-objective fit with, or departure from, his brilliant and lucid conceptual grid ... filled with a sense of Daney’s live-wire excitement, not in regard to his experience of viewing films but, rather, from the pleasure of his own thought process. There’s nothing egocentric or bombastic in this delight. Daney never positions himself above or ahead of films; he approaches them and keeps some distance. The book is wildly quotable and fervently memorable.
Kathleen Collins
RaveThe New Yorker...a multidimensional revelation whose invisibility until now is as grievous a loss to literature as the near-disappearance of Losing Ground has been to the world of movies ... delves deep into modern history and personal experience to yield, in calm yet prismatic phrases, urgent and deeply affecting insights into her times, which echo disturbingly today ... Collins’s style is fine, graceful, and reserved, but pierced with the harsh simplicity of lurking menace. It’s not a style that grabs at life but that moves into it, that passes through it with a quietly adamant determination to keep going but without any illusions about taking action.
