The festival has been introducing vital new filmmaking voices since 1972, and the best selections have always shared a quality that’s hard to quantify but unmistakable in the theater: you walk out perceiving the world differently than how you walked in.

This year’s festival arrives with 24 features and 10 shorts, including one world premiere, 17 North American premieres, and a lineup that runs from Adrian Chiarella’s chilling Leviticus to Rosanne Pel’s lacerating Donkey Days.

Two films stood out to us more than any others.

Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s Chronovisor, a 16mm documentary-mystery about a Vatican time machine and Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers, a Golden Leopard-winning meditation on creative renewal adapted from the manga of Yoshiharu Tsuge.

One film buries you in obsession. The other strips everything away until only the grain of human feeling remains.

Both are making their North American premieres. Both have distribution deals — Grasshopper Film will release Chronovisor theatrically in Fall 2026, and Several Futures opens Two Seasons, Two Strangers at Metrograph on April 24.

But if it’s possible to get tickets, both should be seen at the festival, on the big screen, at MoMA, where the museum itself becomes part of the experience.

Drowning in the Archive

Chronovisor — Kevin Walker & Jack Auen, 2026, USA, 100m

How much are you willing to sacrifice for your obsessions? Your time? Your focus? Your health? Your soul? And what happens when those obsessions feel important — when they might reveal some hidden, critical, essential truth?

Chronovisor begins with a question that sounds like a dare: what if a Benedictine monk really did invent a device capable of viewing events from the past — orations by Cicero, the Crucifixion itself — and what if the Vatican buried it? Father Pellegrino Ernetti’s claim, reported in the Italian press and widely disputed, is the kind of story that should collapse under its own absurdity. Walker and Auen’s brilliance is in making you not care.

They follow Columbia scholar Béatrice Courte (played by real-life professor Anne-Laure Sellier in her screen-acting debut) as she stumbles onto the Chronovisor while researching an entirely unrelated topic, and then does what any serious academic — or anyone who’s ever fallen down a rabbit hole at 2 AM — would do: she abandons her original project entirely and gives herself over to the quest.

The film creeps into you by immersing you in the very personal nature of discovery and the satisfactions that come with an unresolved quest. The grainy 16mm film stock feels like a grungy, half-forgotten memory, and the film’s New York locations — its archives, its libraries, its stubbornly physical repositories of knowledge — become a Borgesian labyrinth where every corridor promises revelation and delivers only deeper mystery.

The score, drawn from the music of Gustav Holst, rises and swells like a Wagnerian opera but never resolves — suspended between desire and satisfaction, always promising a tonal home it refuses to deliver. One is reminded directly of The Metropolitan Opera’s sold out run of Tristan und Isolde, Wagner’s three-act meditation on obsession, love, and death. The opera’s culmination is the Liebestod — the love-death, the never-resolving hunger for something total and annihilating.

Chronovisor is a Liebestod of the intellect. Courte doesn’t seek the device because she expects to find it. She seeks it because the seeking has become the thing itself — the love-death of the scholar, the point where the obsession becomes indistinguishable from the self.

Like Isolde singing into the “billowy surge” and the “gush of sound,” Courte plunges deeper into the archive, sinking into the quest, devoid of all thought except the next clue. The Chronovisor may or may not be real. What’s obviously real — even on first watch — is the force of the obsession.

Chronovisor’s implications are unmistakable: The most powerful conspiracies aren’t the ones that turn out to be true. They’re the ones that make truth feel inadequate by comparison.

A brilliant feature debut. By far the best new film I’ve seen this year.

— Doug Hesney

The Art of Omission

Two Seasons, Two Strangers / 旅と日々 — Sho Miyake, 2025, Japan, 89m — Japanese with English subtitles

A tale of cinema with a bifurcated film-within-a-film structure reminiscent of Hong Sang-soo, Two Seasons, Two Strangers begins in a seaside town, where tourist Nagisa (Yuumi Kawai) and local Natsuo (Mansaku Takada) fall into a lush summer romance, all deep-sea blues and wind-whipped sundresses. It then yanks us out of this story to show its screenwriter, Li (Eun-kyung Shim, a former Korean child star who also acts in Japan), ducking questions and musing on her own creative block at a deliciously awkward post-screening Q&A (“I don’t have much talent”). In need of a creative and personal refresh, Li heads off to a snowy resort, where she meets the divorced innkeeper Benzo (Shin’ichi Tsutsumi). The two soon form the kind of understanding that gives hope to the filmmaker.

In the world of East Asian craft, there is a profound reverence for the monochrome. Whether it is the pale, ethereal green of a celadon vase or the deep, ink-washed shadows of a Zen landscape, the absence of color is never a lack of substance. Instead, it is a deliberate “art of omission” that demands a heightened state of perception.

Sho Miyake’s 2025 film, Two Seasons, Two Strangers (旅と日々), functions as a cinematic extension of this aesthetic. Spanning 89 minutes of rhythmic, quiet observation, the film mirrors the “unbroken field of color” found in white wares, revealing that the most complex landscapes are often those rendered in a single, meditative tone.

The Tactile Glaze of the Everyday

Much like the “refined forms and sophisticated surfaces” of monochrome ceramics, Miyake’s cinematography focuses on the purity of the subject. In the film, the camera treats the passage of time as a glaze — an even application that emphasizes the “smoothness” and “balance of tone” in the characters’ lives.

In the absence of high-octane plot points or “painted motifs” of melodrama, the viewer’s eye is forced to linger on nuanced variations: the texture of a character’s skin, the subtle shift in a gaze, or the way light hits a quiet room. These moments evoke a tactile intimacy similar to red lacquers; they feel organic, vulnerable, and profoundly human.

The Sound of Nature, The Ink of Suspense

Monochrome painting in East Asia — often rendered in shades of black ink — conjures natural scenery like bamboo and mountains through “restrained compositions.” Miyake translates this into a modern cinematic language where sound becomes the ink.

The “sounds of nature” act as the brushstrokes that guide the viewer through a state of “constant suspense.” This is not the suspense of the unknown, but the suspense of the present — the tension inherent in a single, perfectly placed stroke on paper. By emphasizing “shape and contour” through atmospheric sound rather than explicit dialogue, Miyake encourages his audience to “reflect on the process of perception itself.”

A Dream-Logic Handscroll: “What Can’t Be Helped”

The structure of Two Seasons, Two Strangers behaves less like a traditional Western narrative and more like a handscroll. As the story “turns,” it starts on a different spot but stays connected to a central emotional point, moving with the fluid, “artistic and calming” logic of a dream.

Central to this movement is the philosophy of acceptance: “What can’t be helped can’t be helped.” In the kiln of life, as in the kiln of the potter, certain outcomes are inevitable. The film suggests that the “humor” of existence is only truly visible once the viewer recognizes the “human sadness” that forms the base material.

The Meditative Landscape

Ultimately, Sho Miyake has crafted a film that functions as a “rich, meditative landscape.” By stripping away the distractions of traditional storytelling, Two Seasons, Two Strangers achieves the same “contemplative viewing” invited by a flawless porcelain vessel.

It proves that when we remove the motifs of the world, we are left with something far more enduring: the quiet, sophisticated beauty of the human spirit, rendered in a single, perfect hue.

— Yelena Fradlis

Where to Watch: Both films screen as part of the 55th New Directors/New Films, April 8–19, 2026, presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. Tickets at filmlinc.org and moma.org.

Chronovisor Screens Friday, April 10 at 8:45 PM and Saturday, April 11 at 5:30 PM at MoMA, with a Q&A featuring Kevin Walker, Jack Auen, and Anne-Laure Sellier.

Grasshopper Film releases theatrically Fall 2026.

Two Seasons Two Strangers has its North American premiere Thursday, April 17, with an additional screening Saturday, April 19. Several Futures releases the film theatrically at Metrograph on April 24.

We are all here for Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. A three-act meditation on obsession, love and death.

The Room

Five hours. No intermission until you’ve already surrendered an hour and a half of your life to Act I. The woman next to me has smuggled a sandwich in her purse. There are people dressed in hoodies and sparkly ball gowns and blue jeans and tuxedos. Aside from the kids, the line is very similar in composition and conversation to the one my son and I stood in five days later at Citi Field’s Opening Day.

“Can you believe how packed it is?”

“Did you take the train to get here?”

“Back in the 1980s I saw the greatest!”

At Citi Field, much of the crowd is there to see Juan Soto — one of the premier power bats in all of baseball. At the Met, the crowd is here to see Lise Davidsen, a voice so enormous it has its own gravitational field.

I suspect many of the same people drinking prosecco on the Met balcony also queued up next to me at Shake Shack in center field. New York crowds aren’t so siloed in their interests.

I have been coming to the Met Opera House regularly now for a little over a year. I had just finished Jan Swafford’s excellent Beethoven biography, and had to take the opportunity to see Fidelio performed live. The idea of knowing the name of a specific soprano in the cast, let alone a favorite one, would’ve seemed insane.

And yet, I absolutely took note that it was Lise Davidsen singing the role of Leonore. Her voice rang out Ludwig Van’s clarion call to liberty and I sat up straight. By no small measure — I owe my love for opera to that performance.

She is just that good.

After leaving the stage for a year to have children, she is now considered by many (definitely my choice) to be the soprano of her generation. Davidsen wields her voice with near-unprecedented power and control. And for a year I’ve known she would make her return to the stage in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

The Meister

Richard Wagner? The Nazis’ favorite composer? Music mocked and celebrated by Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny? The subject of one of the great Annie Hall jokes? I did not know much about Richard Wagner — but I needed to see Lise Davidsen sing live again, and to have some context for this name who was claimed as inspiration for both incredible feats of artistic genius and human avarice.

Richard Wagner is not only uncancellable — what was once called “Wagnerism” is the aesthetic driving our cultural moment, with all its terrifying and wonderful implications.

Yuval Sharon’s production of Tristan und Isolde is one of the more wonderful results of the current moment. There is no question that having a Jewish interpreter of Wagner feels both morally correct and transgressive in a way the Meister himself might appreciate1. It certainly made it easier for me to accept the idea that his work was not as foreign as I had feared.

But it is unquestionably dangerous.

In Sharon’s program notes, “Drowning in the Waves of the Universal Breath,” he quotes T.S. Eliot — “all is always now” — and explains why he took an approach that builds the stage production on two planes. On the lower level, a corporeal world: bodies moving in slow motion, the mundane reality of ships and sails and politics. Above, the metaphysical: a spiral, a vortex, a tunnel of light where both Tristan and Isolde separate and come together.

It makes the disintermediation with the “real world” physical. Emotions, desires, fantasies and fears are elevated.

The entire cast is solid — particularly Ryan Speedo Green, who was also fantastic as Porgy earlier this season, and who brings his extraordinary bass-baritone to King Marke. This is a man who can carry Gershwin’s and Wagner’s explorations of betrayal in the same body, in the same season, and bring the pain to life with resonant voice. Michael Spyres sings Tristan with intensity and commitment — although from Row G in the Family Circle, he occasionally felt muddled.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts by highlighting the hits within the score. He wants you to know that he knows what’s considered important in the music and lets you hear it. There’s not a lot of subtlety, or the lyricism of the historic Böhm 1966 recording from Bayreuth.

But the sold-out crowd is here for Davidsen. And her Isolde is a historic feat.

The Hymn to Oblivion

Davidsen is a powerful force in voice and body. She plays Isolde as a woman used to being in control and raging at that power being taken. Her infatuation with Tristan melds seamlessly with her hatred for him for taking that power. You can see it written into her body from the first scene, the guilt mixed with the want, the betrayal of Morold — the husband Tristan slew. A betrayal of herself.

This is not romantic love as we sentimentalize it, but the model for the “enemies to lovers” archetype that dominates current romance fiction.

When she and Tristan drink the “love potion” this feeling is unleashed and given full voice.

Now the compulsion is something closer to sex, to addiction, to a pull so physical and total that it overrides every rational calculation she might make about consequences. Isolde knows any path she takes leads to annihilation. Her world, the life she believed she would live is over and now she can’t stop herself from giving into the waves of emotion.

You hear it clearly in the Act II duet. Davidsen and Spyres don’t sing at each other — they sing into each other, their voices braiding and pulling apart like two people who can’t decide whether to kiss or fight. When they reach “O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe” the orchestra drops to almost nothing, and you can hear the two voices naked in the house — his tenor pressing forward, hers enveloping it, both of them finding a sustained aching. Around me in the Family Circle, nobody is moving. The woman with the sandwich has clearly forgotten it exists.

All of Tristan is what Alex Ross calls “a hymn to oblivion.” in his excellent book “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music”. It is a feeling that is very familiar in the world of 2026, and present in every note Davidsen sings.

But the potion reveals and expands what already exists, and aren’t we all a bit like Isolde? So many seek a release from the relentless quantification and optimization and maxxing experience of being alive in 2026 — infatuation leading to oblivion feels like the considered choice.

What we call “doomerism”, or committing to “rot” — the aestheticized decline, the hunger for apocalypse, the seductive conviction that rationalism has exhausted itself and something vast must replace it — all of this would’ve easily been identified as Wagnerism during the early 1900s. Alex Ross calls it a cultural condition — what happens when an entire society loses faith in realism and reaches for myth instead. Wagnerism casts its strongest spell on “the artists of silence — novelists, poets, and painters who envied the collective storms of feeling that he could unleash in sound.”

The Gesamtkunstwerk — the total work of art — was Wagner’s term for what he wanted opera to become, but became what the culture wanted from itself: an experience so complete it could substitute for the yawning gap of meaning in people’s lives. The vegetarians2 and the theosophists and the race theorists and the anarchists — all drinking from the same well, all convinced that what was needed was some new total experience that would dissolve the individual into something larger.

The formation was broad enough to hold Theodor Herzl writing The Jewish State while attending Tannhäuser every night and W.E.B. Du Bois at Bayreuth walking past Wagner’s grave twice a day.3 The same hunger that inspired Herzl was the soundtrack for the Nazis flooding the streets of Europe swinging clubs.

Uncomfortable facts, but history nonetheless.

It is a very human hunger to desire rootedness, and myths that inform identity. We instinctively desire a return to something primal and total — To make things Great again. Art, or nation, or race, or spirit, or love, or death — the cause doesn’t seem to matter as much as the hunger itself.

The Tristan Chord, Everywhere

Like so many other fraught and suicidal moments in history — the strains of the Tristan chord once again rise all around us. The demand for myth has infected our culture and our society.

Look at some of the most resonant pieces of art from the past few years.

Ryan Coogler’s Academy Award-winning Sinners (2025) takes the Wagnerian formation and roots it in the American South, in Black music, and a delta blues juke joint. The vampirism that runs through the film is literal Wagnerism — a mythic and Romantic hunger for sensation that crosses over from ecstasy into the demonic.

Much as the “love potion” reveals and enhances the doomed instincts of Tristan and Isolde, so does the vampire’s kiss. Coogler builds his gothic fantasy on the premise that music can crack open reality, that the right song played in the right room summons forces that reason cannot contain.

These calls to myth through music are instinctive Wagnerism. 19th-century operagoers would have recognized the film’s refusal to resolve in anything like a traditional victory for good over evil as obviously “Wagnerian.”

Coogler is a graduate of the MCU, after all — a franchise now promising its own Götterdämmerung in “Avengers: Doomsday.” The Thor teaser trailer could literally be lifted from the Ring.

Is it any surprise that a Wagner masterpiece like Tristan und Isolde has broken out of the opera bubble and into mainstream culture? It’s the original story of “Heated Rivals” who become lovers. A “Love Story” that can only end in death4. These fascinations are the mainstream concerns of the 21st century.

As cinema and culture enter its New Romantic era, we should expect to see more explicit and implicit Wagnerism take hold. Especially the Liebestod, or “Love-Death.” It is the highlight of Tristan und Isolde, and of Lise Davidsen’s performance.

Liebestod

After nearly five hours, Lise Davidsen emerges from/into a tunnel of oblivion to sing a tribute to “eternal bliss” as she gazes upon Tristan’s lifeless corporeal form. Rushing across the sea to be by his side, Isolde joins him in oblivion — singing in literally the most beautiful music you feel you’ve ever heard:

In this production, Isolde dies in childbirth and sings the Liebestod to both her newborn child and her dead lover.

Rebirth that comes from death. It is a hopeful and moving vision. I really love it in this production, and it never feels tacked on or dishonest. But it can also feel like a Hollywood ending.

Wagner’s original is not nearly as optimistic or life-affirming. Isolde gives herself to the “highest desire” because the annihilation of self is the highest virtue. There is no life. No child. Just the “billowy surge”, the “gush of sound” that is “void of all thought”. Endless waves of emotion. Endless waves of beauty. Never resolving.

Could the Sirens' song that Odysseus lashed himself to the mast to hear sound any different?

I’ve wept before from joy or sadness in the theater or at the movies - but never before from the pure overwhelming force of infinite emotion and infinite sound. It is the treasure in Marcellus Wallace’s case. It is the death of Batman’s parents. It is Rosebud. It’s the portal to the Black Lodge.

If you’re in the room, you can feel reality itself cracking open — as we all drown in “The Infinite All”.

It is a fucking moment.

Once you hear the Tristan chord, you hear it everywhere. It can be heard in the all-consuming fandoms for IP and pop stars. It can be heard in the conspiracy theories that drive our discourse. It is in the notifications on your phone. It is the theme of the gambling and event market app. Drowning in the sinking unconscious. Rotting into decadence.

A politics addicted to the Liebestod, with its never-resolving hunger for something total, something annihilating, something that will dissolve the ordinary world and replace it with meaning or destruction or both at once — is populism’s signature promise.

Highest desire!

During the Liebestod, my mind kept returning to images from Bertrand Bonello’s 2016 film Nocturama. The French director’s interrogation of “Terrorism“ is criminally underseen in the United States, as it is one of the defining political films of the 21st century.

The film uses a non-linear, Reservoir Dogs-like structure to tell the story of a group of young populist terrorists who pull off a major attack on Paris. We are given no context, nor any reason to care about their cause or ideology. We can clearly see they are seized by a feeling so enormous that ordinary life cannot contain it.

Late in the film, one of the terrorists escapes the shopping mall where he and his compatriots are waiting out the night. He bums a cigarette from someone on the street, and the conversation turns to the attacks.

He says: “It had to happen, no? We could all feel it coming. So it had to happen.” No regard for self, or defense for the cause he purports to support — just “sinking” “unconscious, void of all thought”

Liebestod.

On its tenth anniversary, Nocturama feels like prophecy.

Wagnerism as Warning

I’d love to believe Yuval Sharon’s version of the Tristan myth. Wagner’s fascination with reincarnation and rebirth was core to his study of Schopenhauer and Buddhism, so there is no inherent inconsistency. But Wagner wrote what he wrote — and he was picking up on some eternal themes.

When we throw off reason. When reason becomes impossible, or we feel that our freedom and agency have been taken — like Isolde, then Liebestod becomes very attractive. So attractive that we will risk everything. We will call it love. We will sing arias and throw off all of our traditions and rules and morals. We will call it beautiful.

As we move into an era where “optimization” and “maxxing” and “cognitive offloading” and “financialization of everything” seed themselves into daily life, an unconscious desire for Liebestod will grow ever higher. It will show up in beautiful places like Sinners and terrible places like AI psychosis. The need to escape and drown into the sinking unconscious, deeper into our obsessions is a human reaction to our freedoms being taken from us, bit by bit.

Wagnerism is a warning.

And while I love the music and cannot stop thinking about Lise Davidsen’s performance - I cannot help hearing it in places it should not be. I literally cannot stop thinking about it. It is clear that this imperfect, yet undoubtedly sublime and historic production has met its moment.

It is all we can ask of the world’s greatest opera house, in the world’s greatest city.

I cannot wait to return on April 4th.

Night Side Songs at Lincoln Center Theater

Shows run until March 29, 2026

“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” - Susan Sontag.

The experience of Night Side Songs is prefaced with this stoic message. It defines the direction and purpose the play is trying to convey.

And, it does this extremely well. The pseudo-thrust stage, the metatheatrical elements, the raw, almost primal music.

The show makes you part of itself, and each show is unique in that way. It all comes together to form an absolutely unforgettable performance.

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC, Manfred Honeck, conductor; María Dueñas, violin (New York Philharmonic debut). Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61; R. Strauss’s Elektra Symphonic Rhapsody (arr. Honeck/Ille). David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center. February 1, 2026.

My trips to Lincoln Center in the Winter of ‘26 are necessarily frozen. The LIRR runs past the still snow covered houses and then apartment buildings that line the 12 mile trip from the South Shore into Penn Station. The frigid weather is keeping most people indoors, and had I not, in a fit of “New Romantic” pique become a subscriber to the Metropolitan Opera and NY Philharmonic this season - I would be one of them.

And then where would I be?

Stuck inside, cocooned with the rest of the world. Scrolling past the horrible imagery and news from my country, or people and places I care about around the world. But we all know that scroll is infinite and endlessly exhausting.

This is a world in desperate need of sublime joy.

That joy be found! Do not believe the philistines!

It can be found in the final performance of a Metropolitan Opera legend like Denyce Graves in the role of Maria in the Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”. Or the debut performances of a world class violinist like María Dueñas performing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the NY Philharmonic.

Lincoln Center is one of New York’s many gateways into a more elevated world. And like all temples, it demands more of us than “the real world”. It demands our concentration. It demands our respect. And it asks for our love. Is that any different than walking into Madison Square Garden? Or CitiField?1

Twenty-three-year-old María Dueñas commands love, concentration, and respect. Her performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was uplifting and vital. Her playing toed the line between technical precision and fiery emotion. A controlled chaos that reminded me of Geese’s live performance at Brooklyn Paramount last fall. Both Dueñas and Geese appear to be dominated by emotion, but when you look closely you can see the purity of intent and technical brilliance.

Is it any wonder that these artists, raised in a post-9/11 era, in the shadow of the Great Recession, Covid, and populism, could find beauty in chaos? Or try to resolve that chaos with the classic form of rock music or one of Beethoven’s masterworks? They are the children of chaos. It is their language. And they are much better equipped to interpret this world than I am.

Dueñas performed the cadenzas she composed herself for her Deutsche Grammophon debut album Beethoven and Beyond— recorded live at Vienna’s Musikverein with the same conductor standing beside her at Geffen Hall, Manfred Honeck. She is not merely interpreting Beethoven. She is in conversation with him.

A twenty-three-year-old writing her own cadenzas for one of the most demanding concertos in the violin repertoire is already a statement. Playing them on the stage of her New York Philharmonic debut, reunited with the conductor who believed in her enough to record them, is something else entirely.

By the middle of the first movement, time became unstuck.

There is a scene in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners where the music in that juke joint builds until the universe cracks open — where the Blues become so true and so powerful that the boundaries between past and present and future dissolve, and you can see the whole history of a people’s joy and suffering pouring through one room.

There is no other way to explain what happened last Sunday in Geffen Hall. This universal and eternal music of Beethoven, written two centuries ago, was being driven by unknown powers into this young woman’s hands. It was divine. It was the opposite of the frozen world.

There is such power in music!

The Larghetto was a prayer. Dueñas led it the way a cantor leads a congregation — not performing for them but drawing them into something larger than any individual in the room. The orchestra followed. The audience followed. It was tender and unhurried, with the patience that only absolute confidence permits.

There is a quality in certain young performers where you sense they have been carrying a piece of music inside them for years, waiting for a room large enough to set it down. Geffen Hall was that room. Honeck and the Philharmonic were locked in with her completely.

And when the Rondo: Allegro arrived, she did not release the tension so much as transform it — channeling everything inward before letting it cascade outward in waves that felt, in the moment, like the most natural thing in the world. The way snow melts when the season finally decides to turn.

Three standing ovations. Dueñas returned for an encore — Halvorsen’s “Song of Veslemøy” from the Mosaique Suite — and played it with the same sweet, sharp, passionate intensity she had brought to Beethoven. As if she had more to give and could not bear to leave us yet. As if the room, and perhaps the world needed her and this music.

I will never forget it.

After intermission, Honeck turned to Strauss.

His own Elektra Symphonic Rhapsody — an orchestral distillation of the opera’s psychosexual fury, arranged with Thomas Ille — is a statement piece by a conductor who understands that Strauss’s music contains its own theater. You do not need the staging. The music is the drama.

I have felt Strauss’s violence before. At the Met last May, Salome was the most intense live theater experience of my life — severed heads, blood-drenched arias, fifty-foot ghosts projected above the stage. It overwhelmed the senses. It was supposed to.

But hearing Elektra stripped of spectacle, rendered as pure orchestral architecture, revealed something I had not understood before. Without the bodies on stage, without the visual horror, Strauss’s music itself carries the full weight of human degradation and human grandeur. The beauty is not separate from the terror. They are the same material, shaped differently.

Strauss knew this. Dueñas, playing Beethoven an hour earlier, knew it too — that controlled chaos, fury resolved into classical form.

These children of chaotic times would easily recognize each other across centuries.

The LIRR home was dark and quiet. Snow still covering everything. The particular silence of a suburban platform in winter — the tracks silver under the station lights, the cold absolute.

I scrolled on my phone.

The Kennedy Center — the nation’s living memorial to a slain president, home to the National Symphony Orchestra, the Washington National Opera, hundreds of performances a year — would close on July 4th for a “complete rebuilding.”

All after the Washington National Opera had severed ties with the building entirely.

I read this somewhere between Penn Station and the South Shore, still carrying Beethoven’s Larghetto inside me like a held breath. The regular world seems open. The LIRR still run on schedule (mostly). But something fundamental has shifted, and those who pay attention can feel it — in the names being scraped off buildings and replaced with others, in the way a phone screen glows with bad news after three hours of transcendence.

The lights are flickering.

A week before Dueñas, I was at the Met for the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.

The last time I saw this opera was January 2020. Orchestra Row T. It was my first time inside the Metropolitan Opera House. I barely knew what I was watching.

I returned to Catfish Row a different person.

My nephew came with me. This was his second opera — his first was Don Giovanni back in November, where over Bloody Marys at PJ Clarke’s we’d talked about his generation’s anxiety, the algorithmic isolation, the general sense of decline that hangs over everything like weather.

He’d been riveted by Giovanni’s story — Mozart’s propulsive score driving that rich, rapacious anti-hero toward damnation. He preferred Giovanni’s narrative to Porgy’s. But the Gershwins’ music stopped him. You could see it happen. “Summertime.” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

My nephew’s world is the same world as Geese’s and Dueñas’s — his adult years have been defined by chaos and slop and a pervasive sense of decline. His generation’s college years were devoured by Covid. Their young adulthood arrived into populism and algorithmic loneliness.

Who needs the flickering lights of sublimity more than them? Who needs to sit in a room where a hundred performers build a community on a stage and a thousand strangers share in it?

I’ve been reading a lot of Joseph Roth lately. His portraits of a society in decadent collapse, of normal people carrying on their rituals while the ground shifts underneath them, are my way of dealing with the present by looking to the past.

His novel The Radetzky March has been my constant companion on the LIRR into the city. The main character - Carl Joseph, a young man who sees the decadence and decline of his world, and my nephew would find much to discuss.

Kwamé Ryan conducted Porgy and Bess with a warmth that let the ensemble breathe. The production — that magnificent two-story Catfish Row set, bodies filling every balcony, every doorway, every staircase — felt not like a staged community but a living one. And at its center, Denyce Graves sang Maria for the final time.

Graves sang with the authority of someone who has nothing left to prove and everything left to give. Her Maria is the moral center of Porgy and Bess — the one who holds the community together when violence and temptation threaten to tear it apart. That this was her final performance in the role, in this particular winter, in this particular America, gave every note a weight the Gershwins could not have anticipated.

When the full company gathered for the curtain call — spilling across every level of that two-story set, a hundred performers packed into every corner of Catfish Row — it looked like the entire world had shown up to say goodbye. Or to testify. The image stays with me: all of them together, the chorus and the principals, the community intact on stage even as communities are being dismantled elsewhere.

I turned on my phone when I left the Met that afternoon.

Alex Pretti had been shot.

A thirty-seven-year-old ICU nurse at a VA hospital in Minneapolis, killed by federal agents while filming them on his phone. He had stepped between an agent and a woman who had been pushed to the ground. For this, he was pepper-sprayed, tackled, and shot multiple times while pinned on an icy street. Ten shots in less than five seconds.

I thought of Dr. Demant — the gentle, near-sighted regimental doctor who befriends Carl Joseph in The Radetzky March. A healer by nature. He is forced into a duel over his wife’s honor. He cannot even see clearly enough to aim. He goes anyway, because something in him will not allow the insult to stand. His senseless death is a turning point towards something darker.

Sublimity and degradation are nothing new.

I do not pretend that attending the New York Philharmonic is an act of resistance. I do not believe that opera or art will save anyone. These are, in the end, Saturday afternoons in beautiful rooms, with music that is at least a century old.

But In a winter when the Kennedy Center is being gutted, when the National Symphony Orchestra does not know where it will perform next season, in this frozen and dark winter, a twenty-three-year-old violinist from Spain stood on the stage of David Geffen Hall and played Beethoven’s Violin Concerto as though the entire tradition depended on her. And it was not defiance. It was not protest. It was simply what she does.

She plays, and the world briefly becomes what it should be.

In this same winter, a legendary mezzo-soprano sang her final Maria on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, and a hundred performers filled every level of Catfish Row, and a thousand strangers held their breath together.

The scroll brings us infinite images of unbearable degradation. And they are as real as the cold biting air.

But the LIRR runs both ways. These performances are not a refuge from a frozen world — they are a path through it. Do we care enough to save our institutions in our city? Or must we suffer the fate of our Capital?

Or will we feel the warmth of sublimity on our faces, as is our historic privilege as New Yorkers and Americans.

returns with a piece that moves from costume design to monumental sculpture. Richard Serra died in March 2024. His work at the Nassau County Museum of Art remains—worth your Sunday morning. - DH

To stand before a Richard Serra sculpture on a somber January morning is to enter a cinematic space where you are both the lead actor and the lens. Before Serra transformed landscapes with colossal walls of steel, he was documenting the raw, human friction of effort and gravity through the camera.

The Cinema of Effort

His early films are not merely “movies”; they are studies of the human spirit grappling with the material world. When we watch his first film, Hand Catching Lead (1968), we witness a hand tirelessly attempting to snatch falling lead—a rhythmic, almost desperate dance of focus. In Hand Lead Fulcrum (1968), we see the artist himself struggling under the literal weight of a lead cylinder.

These films mirror the internal “perceptual gap” we all feel in the quiet of winter. As we stare at the frozen steel plates at the Nassau County Museum of Art, we see a reflection of our own resilience. Like the methodical sweeping of steel shavings in his collaboration with Philip Glass, Hands Scraping (1968), our lives are often composed of these repetitive, quiet labors of maintenance and care.

Reflections in the Metal

The Cor-Ten steel, with its deep umber patina, acts as a monumental mirror for the soul. In the stark light of a New York winter, the metal doesn’t just block the path; it frames our thoughts.

The heavy industrial presence validates the weight of our own inner reflections. The rust is not decay, but a protective skin—a marking of strength through vulnerability. Just as Serra’s film Frame (1969) explored the difference between what the eye sees and what the camera captures, the sculpture garden invites us to notice what we usually overlook in ourselves.

Visit the Grounds

The healing power of this landscape lies in its accessibility. The interplay of art and nature is a dialogue that never closes, offering a sanctuary for those seeking a moment of cinematic clarity.

Location: Nassau County Museum of Art grounds, Roslyn Harbor

Hours: The grounds and sculpture garden are open sunrise to sunset

The Experience: Walk the 145 acres and let the Serra sculptures “edit” your view of the trees and the sky

To read more: The Films and Videos of Richard Serra - Harvard Film Archive

7:00 PM: Brooklyn Paramount, November 20, 2025.

General Admission Floor, Security Gate by VIP Section (approximately 20 rows back)

Geese: Cameron Winter (vocals, guitar) Dominic DiGesu (bass) Emily Green (guitar) Max Bassin (drums)

There’s a Bomb in My Car

There’s a moment in “Trinidad” where Cameron Winter pauses before all hell breaks loose. Far from the cathartic explosions of youth anthems like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Seven Nation Army,” Geese’s frontman begins the song and the album telling us, wailing at us over a simple funk lick:

“I try… So hard.”

And then, in a symphonic explosion of atonal noise that would do Stravinsky proud:

“THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!!!!”

“THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!!!!”

“On and on and on... On and on and on…”

I cannot think of a single moment, lyric, or song that so perfectly captures how it feels to be alive in 2025.

Trying every day. So hard.

Explosions! Panic! No resolution and on and on and on.

When Geese played one of their final North American shows at the Brooklyn Paramount on Thursday night, the band and the crowd hit that moment where everyone in the room knows exactly what they’re there for. As someone lucky enough to have seen Nirvana at Roseland in ‘93, the Strokes at MSG Theater in ‘03, and the White Stripes at Irving Plaza in ‘07, it brings me great joy to tell you — the kids are alright.

A Band Created in a Lab?

Cards on the table—Geese is a band that may have been created in a lab just for my benefit. They wear their New York influences openly: the Velvet Underground’s art-damaged sprawl, Television’s guitar interplay, the Strokes’ urban cool. They’re Mets fans who geek out about their fandom.

But it should be no surprise that if rock’s revival is truly at hand, a New York band would be at its forefront. Since the last great explosion 20 years ago, New York bands from the National to Big Thief to Been Stellar have been carrying a torch for the burgeoning rock counterculture.

Strange Delight

My friend Dan and I had dinner beforehand at Strange Delight in Fort Greene—for martinis and a light dinner, the kind of pre-show ritual that matters when you’re 49 and doors open at 7. We got to talking with this guy in his sixties who told us he’s seen everyone—decades of shows, the whole history. This was the show he was most excited for all year.

I continued my evangelism for Rosalía’s Lux, which is the only album released in 2025 that rivals Geese’s Getting Killed. Both are equally brilliant. He nodded, pulled out his phone to make a note. He is all about MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee - who admittedly are great.

Geese attracted a truly diverse crowd at the Paramount, which spanned generations, fashion styles, and likely local Brooklynites and suburbanites like myself. In our section we were mixing with everyone from our age to twenty-somethings who probably weren’t born when I saw the Strokes.

With resale prices going for $300+ and people literally standing outside the doors begging for tickets—the people in the room clearly needed to be in the room.

Dan and I staked out a spot right by the VIP section, leaning on one of those security gates. Not heading back into the mosh pit at this point in life. But the position was perfect—you could see everything

Ripping through a fifteen-song set, they opened with “Husbands,” that song-long crescendo that builds and builds until it has to break. They channeled the spirits of the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls and Television. Noisy, fuzzy atonal rock that resolves into melody when you need it most.

By the time they hit “Taxes” late in the set, the entire room sang louder than Winter’s amplified voice — anthemic without resorting to the cheap showman’s tricks that have become the hallmark of the “poptimist” era.

The real shit.

GEESE IS THE MOMENT

Geese is the kind of band that will inspire 100 new bands every time they play live. Maybe 124.

recently wrote about “The Moment”—when someone commands clear attention as the center of the most important environment. Reggie writes that “The Moment” can’t be faked or marketed into existence. It’s earned through performance and narrative, adorned on you like a prize.

Thursday night, as hundreds of kids held aloft lighters (lighters!!!)and chanted “One More Song! One More Song!” Geese had The Moment.

And when they came back for the encore… I mean this is why we go to rock shows.

Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto: Lorenzo Da Ponte
Director: Ivo van Hove
Conductor: Daniele Rustioni

Cast: Kyle Ketelsen (Don Giovanni), Tommaso Barea (Leporello), Guanqun Yu (Donna Anna), Anita Hartig (Donna Elvira), Andrea Carroll (Zerlina), Paul Appleby (Don Ottavio), Brandon Cedel (Masetto), Soloman Howard (Il Commendatore)

The writer recently described young men as “monks in the casino”—risk-averse socially, risk-chasing financially, living in rooms full of screens.

Preferring the discomfort of losing a bet to the anxiety of being rejected on a date, Thompson profiles extreme cases: a 28-year-old whose bedroom features 27 pornographic videos playing simultaneously, a 26-year-old who gambled away his salary and now bets on Malaysian soccer at 3 a.m.

“Guys sitting alone in their rooms being viciously abused by their computers,” he writes, “sinking deeper into the despair that compelled them to seek out that abuse.”

My nephew happens to be in his mid-twenties, just moved into his own place, working his first real job. He’s not even close to one of Thompson’s extreme cases, but he certainly knows people with these challenges. His college experience got cut by Covid, and he believes his generation never really recovered. He told me about one person he knew who emptied their bank account and stole from their parents to feed an OnlyFans addiction.

Grim stuff.

argues in her brilliant Substack piece “The Loneliness Crisis is a Revealed Choice” that many people are choosing isolation because it’s “the path of least resistance.” Empty nightclubs where nobody dances despite nothing stopping them. People relieved when friends cancel plans they never wanted to attend. The real barrier today isn’t money but that “going to a nightclub and meeting new people is work...there are inherent risks, like embarrassment or awkwardness.”

I asked my nephew if he wanted to see Don Giovanni at the Met—I had no idea if he’d be interested. We’ve seen Japanese cinema together, caught Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest, but opera felt different. To his credit, he’s been increasingly open to culture, so he agreed - despite having very few ideas about what to expect.

Over lunch at PJ Clarke’s before the performance, we talked about his thoughts on some of these issues. He confirmed—the anxiety is at real heights, the general alienation, the algorithmic world promising connection while delivering isolation, is leaving people empty. He described it with the weary clarity of someone who understands the systems his generation relies on are creating their alienation.

My Backpages

Three shots of vodka in a Bloody Mary have a way of playing with memory. Listening to him, I found myself transported back twenty years to a not-so-different Upper West Side.

I was just out of law school, working temp legal jobs, barely hanging onto a $400-a-month sublet on Rivington Street. Many college friends were married or engaged, with careers and six-figure salaries. I had the type of financial situation where a bodega bacon egg and cheese felt like debit card roulette.

But despite being broke, it was never a question of whether it was possible to get dates. The city was full of poor students, artists, and strivers getting by on charm. Which is what I relied on to find a girlfriend with a great ground-level apartment fifteen blocks from Lincoln Center.

Reader, with twenty years of hindsight: I was a terrible boyfriend.

She paid for a lot, I smoked much of her weed, I stayed at her much nicer apartment as much as possible. When it ended, I couldn’t believe how unfair she was TO me. The nerve.

It felt like one of the worst times. But it was entirely necessary. It prompted me to give up my sublet and focus on finding a permanent job.

Five months later I met my now wife, passed the bar on the second try and found the job that set up my career. Five years later I was married, a father and a homeowner.

Things turn quick.

I told my nephew this walking to the Met. Not to do the insufferable “back in my day” routine (ok maybe a little bit), but because I remember that feeling of alienation and loneliness I read about in his generation.

All of this was swirling through my mind as we ascended the red staircase, and the chandeliers began to rise.

THE HEAT

Don Giovanni is obviously one of the greatest operas ever written. Its propulsive, thunderous score and mix of high and low comedy gives us the model for so many anti-heroes to come. Rich, rapacious assholes have always existed—claiming “freedom” from moral law to worship their own material appetites. Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte understood this. They built each moment to advance Giovanni’s appetite toward an all-consuming conclusion.

The structure is merciless. It begins with Giovanni killing the Commendatore after attempting to violate his daughter. No escape, no redemption. Just cause and effect. The dead man’s memorial statue will return to condemn Giovanni to hell in the stunning finale.

Director Ivo van Hove—who staged that devastating Salome I saw last year—treats the Met’s massive stage as a film set, using space and movement to create immediate psychological states. His Don Giovanni is urgent, physical, dangerous.

Andrea Carroll’s Zerlina stole the afternoon. Every entrance changed the temperature in the house. Her voice carried real sexuality—not polite “sensuality” but the kind that makes you sit forward in your seat. When Don Giovanni seduced her away from her wedding to Masetto, you felt temptation in her performance. Not naïveté but appetite for what life might offer beyond the safe, predictable choice.

Kyle Ketelsen’s Giovanni radiated charisma while committing atrocities. His voice rich and fluid, effortlessly seductive in “Là ci darem la mano”—showing you exactly why women fall for this man despite knowing what he is.

Giovanni’s passion reads as freedom, as life itself. But it blazes into an inferno of avarice and cruelty, consuming everything it touches until damnation arrives.

Tommaso Barea’s Leporello provided real comic heart, his catalogue aria—reciting Giovanni’s conquests to the abandoned Donna Elvira—had the audience laughing at the audacity while grasping the horror underneath. “In Italy, 640. In Germany, 231. In France, 100. In Turkey, 91. But in Spain, already 1,003!” He played Leporello as Giovanni’s doppelgänger and enabler, the faithful servant mirroring his damned master.

When Soloman Howard’s Commendatore ghost arrives for judgment, Van Hove uses the Met’s massive stage to make Hell physical. Walls closing, orchestra unleashing torrents of sound. Howard’s voice as judgment itself, offering Giovanni one last chance at redemption, to accept God.

Even with Hell opening beneath him, Giovanni refused. “No! No! No!” he sang, defying a moral universe even as demons dragged him to eternal damnation. Mozart’s score ferocious—all that elegance from the overture weaponized for supernatural reckoning, Classical form barely containing Romantic intensity.

My nephew’s assessment: “Sensory overload, in the best way.”

THE COLD

I’m working through the Criterion Bergman Box Set as part of a Film at Lincoln Center Discord Channel watch-along, and Bergman’s 1957 masterpiece Wild Strawberries happened to be scheduled for this week.1 It was nothing more than pure serendipity that after an afternoon watching Giovanni’s damnation and hellfire, I’d spend the evening with Professor Isak Borg’s cold isolation.

Professor Isak Borg is a retired physician traveling to southern Sweden to receive an honorary degree. He lives with his housekeeper Miss Agda, who maintains sardonic affection for him, and his daughter-in-law Marianne, who moved in temporarily after separating from his son Evald.

The film opens with a nightmare. Borg walks empty Stockholm streets, encountering a clock face without hands—time itself broken. A funeral procession appears with no mourners. The corpse in the casket reaches out and grabs him. He’s witnessing his own death, alone, unmourned, time having stopped long before his heart did.

This is where temperature inverts. Don Giovanni and Wild Strawberries ask similar questions about a life without moral limits, but at opposite ends of the thermostat.

Borg’s dream forces a decision. Instead of flying to Lund, Borg chooses to drive—a journey that becomes psychological excavation. Marianne joins him, her contempt barely concealed. She sees what his coldness has done to Evald, what it’s doing to their marriage.

Bergman structures the journey like Freudian archaeology.

Borg returns to his family’s summer house—the place where wild strawberries grow. The flashback shows his uncle’s birthday celebration, the whole family gathered in sunlight and warmth. Not pure trauma but happiness mixed with loss—showing what connection looked like before Borg froze himself against it.

Then comes the crushing moment. Young Sara picks wild strawberries—the film’s titular image. She’s secretly engaged to Isak, but we watch as his brother Sigfrid seduces her with warmth Isak never offered. She chooses heat over cold, passion over propriety. Borg lost her through his own emotional withdrawal, his inability to offer what she needed, even as happiness surrounded them.

Then hitchhikers appear. Three young people—a girl named Sara and two competing suitors—traveling to Italy. Borg is stunned. This Sara, played by Bibi Andersson, looks exactly like the Sara from his memories. The woman he lost to his brother’s warmth now sits in his car, still choosing between competing versions of masculinity, vital and alive while Borg remains frozen.

Bergman’s doubling isn’t metaphor. It’s showing how patterns repeat, how the past never stops being present, how psychological wounds replay endlessly until confronted. The woman sitting in his car IS the woman from his memory, time collapsing into a single accusatory presence.

They stop at a gas station. The attendant recognizes Borg and refuses payment because of all the work he’s done for their community. The gratitude is real. Borg was a great physician, worthy of his university’s highest honors. But at home, he was frozen.

A near-death car accident brings another couple into the journey—middle-aged, bitter and vicious with each other. Not playful arguments but toxic residue of decades of mutual contempt. Marianne watches them, visibly distressed—she’s seeing her own future with Evald if the pattern continues.

That night comes the film’s most devastating dream sequence. Borg witnesses his wife with her lover, forced to confront the infidelity he spent his marriage accepting without judgment. The memory isn’t softened by time but remains raw, unprocessed. Seventy years later, the wound stays fresh because he never confronted it, never felt it, never let himself experience the actual human messiness of betrayal and anger.

He passes this coldness to his son Evald like an inheritance. Not just emotionally but through cruel acts that demonstrate his frozen heart. Demanding debt repayment from his own son. Treating family bonds as financial transactions. The coldness became institutional, systematic, a way of organizing life that eliminated all warmth.

In one of the film’s most devastating moments, we learn that Marianne left Evald because she’s pregnant and he “refuses to bring another wretch” into this cold world. Evald learned from his father that marriage is burden, that family is obligation, that love is something to freeze yourself against.

The young hitchhikers—warm, vital, arguing about God and poetry—expose Borg’s isolation through their sheer aliveness. When Professor Borg recounts “The friend” from Viktor Rydberg’s poem, he’s reminding himself as well as “the children” about divine presence in human connection. The grace Borg lost by freezing himself against pain.

TEMPERATURE AND TIME

Don Giovanni moves forward into hellfire, refusing God until the end.

Borg moves backward through dreams, embracing the excavation despite its pain. Bergman makes you feel Borg’s redemption the way Mozart makes you feel Giovanni’s damnation—not as concept but as embodied experience.

In one of cinema’s most beautiful scenes, Borg finds his “friend”—the divine presence in human connection from Rydberg’s poem. A man who lived badly for seventy years finally sees the harm he caused. In seeing it, he breaks the cycle. His son declares of his wife “I cannot live without her.” His unborn grandchild might know warmth.

Late, but not too late.

Giovanni consumes everything he touches until damnation arrives. Borg withdraws from everything that might touch him until dreams force recognition. One burning, one frozen—both immersed in human cruelty and misery.

Both works demonstrate that time is an illusion when it comes to these matters. We can be imprisoned by the past or find it a source of memory and reconciliation. Borg’s journey walks the moral path—confronting what he did, accepting the pain, choosing change.

Things turn quick.

When thinking of “the modern loneliness crisis” in light of these works, there’s really nothing modern about it at all.

Giovanni’s burning consumption and Borg’s frozen isolation demonstrate the same truth: when you deny human connection in favor of appetite or withdrawal, the effect is damnation.

The form changes but the pattern holds.

Don Giovanni consumes until damnation arrives. Professor Borg withdraws until his dreams force recognition. But these men demonstrate the same lesson: we’re making choices, moment by moment, that add up to either connection or isolation.

Things turn quick. But only through the accumulation of those small choices—to leave your room, to sit in discomfort, to risk feeling something real.

As part of our NoirVember programming, this performance traces noir back to its literary origins. Poe invented the psychological darkness that would define film noir a century later—these 1928 films use optical distortion and shadow the way later noir would, making visible what Poe’s prose could only describe.

, Creative Director of the , brings her design expertise to analyzing how contemporary composition transforms historical material. This continues our “In The Room” series, extending Cognitive Frames’ democratic criticism approach beyond cinema into live performance. — D.H.

Silent film with live score sounds like nostalgia—until you’re in the room.

In the age of omnipresent digital soundscapes, there is a profound magic in returning to the roots of cinema, particularly when the silence is shattered and reshaped by a live, contemporary score. An evening dedicated to Poe’s macabre visions is a testament to the power of reimagining history—a signature move for any artist with an eye for both the past and the avant-garde.

At the Morgan Library & Museum, the Curiosity Cabinet treated rescoring not as historical preservation but as creative intervention, fitting two 1928 experimental films with contemporary compositions that refused to be polite about Poe’s madness.

It is the fusion of two highly specific art forms.

The Precision of Madness: Scoring Poe’s Visions

The program’s success hinges on applying this modern compositional rigor to Edgar Allan Poe’s enduring themes of decay and paranoia.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

The film by Melville Webber and J.S. Watson Jr. is less a narrative than an aesthetic impression. It is an object lesson in visual distortion, created by directors who were not conventional filmmakers:

• Optical Technique: The work is defined by its use of the camera as a psychological tool. Shots utilized prisms and layering to achieve optical distortion, immediately suggesting a fractured, unreliable reality. The visuals conflate the characters’ deteriorating minds with the decaying manor.

• The Score’s Response: The live score is notably sensitive to the strangeness of the visual environment. It employs registral extremes and percussive effects to match the film’s unique, alluring madness. When the images shimmer with instability, the music does the structural work to support that unease.

The Tell-Tale Heart (1928)

In this performance, the score operates as a kind of sonic polygraph.

• The Leit-Motif: The music establishes a parallel drama through musical themes, or leitmotifs. The narrator is assigned a “death waltz,” while the victim’s presence is marked by the distinct ‘Vulture Eye Chord’.

• A Sound Confession: The dramatic climax is achieved not just visually, but musically. Though the narrator is initially calm, the score betrays his psychological torture. The music literally becomes the sound of the heart beating beneath the floorboards, with the waltz dissolving into a quick 5/8 section. It is a masterful, precise exposure of guilt.

Poetry and Structural Design

The ensemble provides necessary contrast by setting Poe’s verse with instrumental pieces that offer intimate focus:

• Evening Star achieves bittersweet resignation through the delicate sparseness of the piano’s upper register. The music finds solace in observing what distance renders inaccessible.

  

• Quoth the Raven, the theatrical retelling of The Raven, uses the clarinet to track the narrator’s increasing mental stress. The music’s escalating pulse, from a calm background into a lively compound meter, details the psychological collapse caused by a single, economical word: “Nevermore”. The clarinet’s journey mirrors what Poe understood: repetition isn’t just emphasis—it’s mental dissolution made audible.

The evening succeeds because it refuses the museum impulse—that careful distance that treats historical work as too fragile to touch. The Curiosity Cabinet understood that Poe’s visions remain potent precisely because they’re not preserved but reanimated, not respected but inhabited.

Contemporary composition doesn’t diminish these 1928 films. It proves they’re still dangerous. The Morgan Library preserves Poe’s manuscripts behind glass; the Gilder Lehrman Hall that night proved those words still draw blood when you give them sound.

What I remember most about Jake wasn’t his facility with startup jargon (though he mastered it), but his ability to spot the actual human story buried underneath all that disruption theater. While others polished pitch decks for the next big thing, Jake saw the comedy, the tension, the unspoken truth that made it all absurd.

Now a full-time law student, we reconnected through Substack, where Jake now writes about law, technology, and culture. When I told him Cognitive Frames was expanding beyond film criticism to cover live performance, he immediately got it: criticism that treats the audience experience as inseparable from the art itself.

His piece on Art is exactly what we’re after. Three men arguing about a white canvas becomes a mirror reflecting your own friendships, your own need for validation, your own carefully constructed self-image. That’s what In the Room is about—the moment live performance stops being something you observe and becomes something you inhabit.

Welcome, Jake. We’re glad you’re here! - D.H.

My girlfriend and I recently saw Art. We went to a matinee and were met with sweltering September heat, baking on the sidewalk while we waited to get in. Waiting there felt like a kind of tribute, an offering to the Broadway gods before the show.

Once inside, the staff moved us along briskly, almost dismissively. No smiles, no welcome. Not that I expected Disney World, but you don’t usually get that kind of terse reception on Broadway. It was funny in a way, like they themselves didn’t quite buy the hype. Maybe it was intentional - a little forewarning that mirrored the show’s own skepticism. Maybe the ushers were preluding Art with their own critique. Either way, that faint air of doubt felt almost tangible as we found our seats.

When the lights dimmed, the room snapped to attention. No grand overture, no dizzying set pieces. Just three men, a simple room, a few chairs, and a white “painting.”

I’ve seen the Broadway shows built to impress - the rising sets of Wicked, the hypnotic staging of The Lion King. Art isn’t that, nor does it try to be. It’s almost aggressively plain. The stage feels like a rehearsal room someone forgot to decorate. But that simplicity is a trap: it forces you to look harder, not at props or design, but at people, onstage and around you.

That’s what excited me. Knowing the show would live or die on dialogue had me eager. So often we lean on aesthetics to add value, or to distract from thin substance. Art makes no such attempt. The show hinges entirely on the words. In an era of short attention spans and endless video scrolls, I loved locking into ninety straight minutes of conversation. It even made me think of 12 Angry Men, a single room as a direct line into the machinery of relationships and human nature.

Art isn’t about art at all. It doesn’t want to be. It’s about friendship, and the quiet, ego-driven math that can live underneath it.

As the three friends argue about whether a blank white painting is “real art,” you start to feel the argument shifting. It’s not about taste anymore, it’s about validation. About what it means when the people who know you best suddenly stop seeing you the way you want to be seen.

Somewhere around the midpoint, I realized I wasn’t watching them anymore. I was thinking about my own friendships and how many of them were built on shared jokes or mutual ambition, and how fragile that foundation can be when the balance shifts. When one person grows faster, or slower, or in a different direction altogether.

That’s the genius of Art: it sneaks up on you. You walk in expecting three men arguing about modernism, and by the second act you’re thinking about your own worst moments - times you mistook someone else’s success for a threat, tried too hard to be understood, or failed to see a friend’s frustration wasn’t really about you at all.

The play reminded me that our own self-image is often just as blank as that white canvas - something others project meaning onto. We tell ourselves we’re the “main character,” the reasonable one, the glue holding things together. But to everyone else, we’re just another part of the composition. Sometimes background, sometimes accent, occasionally the thing that throws the whole piece off balance.

The older I get, the more I think friendship isn’t about finding people who see you exactly as you want to be seen. It’s about being okay when they don’t and realizing you can still love someone even when their version of you doesn’t line up with your own.

That’s what Art leaves you with, not the laughter or the lines, but a kind of uneasy quiet. The recognition that life is lighter when you stop needing to be the protagonist all the time. When you can sit in the back row, sweating and squinting, and still feel lucky just to be in the room.

Life gets a lot more fun when you can celebrate other people’s moments instead of resenting the ones you missed. I hope I can keep learning, and trying, to find beauty in a blank canvas. And if I can’t, I hope the people I love will help me on the way.

Jake Weintraub is a first-year law student and the writer behind In Re: Everything, a Substack exploring where law collides with technology and culture. After several years in strategic communications advising emerging tech companies and publicly traded firms on media and regulatory narratives, he stepped away to reset his perspective before starting law school - tutoring students across New York City and working in retail. He credits that chapter with refining his patience, perspective, and ability to tailor communication to any audience.

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY
Metropolitan Opera House
September 26, 2025, 8:00 PM
Dress Circle Row G, Seats 7, 9

Music: Mason Bates
Libretto: Gene Scheer
Director: Bartlett Sher
Conductor: Yannick Nézet-Séguin

Cast: Andrzej Filończyk (Joe Kavalier), Miles Mykkanen (Sam Clay), Sun-Ly Pierce (Rosa Saks), Edward Nelson (Tracy Bacon)

God I love comic books. I love their familiarity and their ordered moral universe.

Peter Parker is meant to suffer, so his victories as Spider-Man become that much more meaningful—but never consequential. The Flash can breach universes and travel through time at will—but can never save those closest to him. (We’re talking about the comic books here, not the godawful 2023 Andy Muschietti film.) Batman is, well, Batman, but his mission can never and will never end.

These are our American myths. Outsiders. Nerds. Aliens needing refuge. The traumatized. The weakest made the bravest. Putting the bullies and hate mongers and criminals in their place. If only until next month.

When I was a kid first reading Spider-Man and Superman stories, I gave very little thought to the creators past or present. It wasn’t until years later, long after I had acquired long-boxes and key issues, that I realized their artistic and political significance.

Jewish kids drawing themselves as gods while their relatives died in Europe. The American refuge as four-color fever dream.

The novel and now the Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay are major artistic achievements on their own accord—because they so deeply tap into this powerful vein of American storytelling and wish-fulfillment.

For me — it was the most powerful new American stage production I’ve seen since Hamilton.

I wish everyone could see it.

The Economics of Wonder

The traditional knock on opera is that it’s inaccessible, elitist, expensive and boring.

The 2025 reality is significantly more dynamic, particularly when most Broadway theaters charge $150 to walk in the door.

Think about that for a second. To see the The Outsiders - it can be upwards of $300 for a pair of not-so-decent seats. Meanwhile, Family Circle tickets for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay start at $65.

And there are no gross Elmos to accost you when you leave the theater.

If you’re enough of a fan of musical theater to bite that $300 bullet, you owe it to yourself to check out the Met. The vast majority of Broadway productions I’ve attended in the past 10 years pale in comparison to the Met’s quality of stagecraft, special effects and performance—both on stage and in the orchestra.

Although repertory productions of Mozart and Puccini and Strauss are essential for artistic and commercial reasons, the art needs new life to breathe and evolve. No risks, no reward.

And Kavalier & Clay is well worth the $65 and more.

American Myths

’s 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel understood something essential: the Golden Age of comics wasn’t just about men in tights. It was Jewish American kids—Siegel and Shuster, Kirby and Simon, Bob Kane—processing the Holocaust through power fantasies while their relatives died in Europe.

Gene Scheer’s libretto distills Chabon’s 600-page epic into pure emotional architecture.

The production tells the story of two Jewish cousins in Brooklyn—Joe Kavalier, a refugee who escaped Nazi-occupied Prague in a coffin and Sam Clay, a closeted survivor of polio with dreams of writing the great American novel. Instead, they create “The Escapist”—an anti-fascist superhero who liberates the oppressed and punches Nazis on every other cover.

Their only-in-America success story runs parallel to only-in-America tragedy. While the Escapist saves everyone in four-color glory, the real world keeps its brutal tempo.

The Ark of Miriam—the ship carrying Jewish refugee children including Joe’s sister—gets torpedoed by a U-boat. Sam gets caught in an FBI raid at a secret party for gay men, sending off his partner Tracy (the radio voice of the Escapist) to fight in Europe. Joe vanishes to fight in Europe. Rosa and Sam are left to raise Sarah, Joe’s daughter, together. Secret identities made real.

The opera’s three-world structure—Nazi Prague, 1940s New York, and the comic book dimension—lets Bates and Scheer explore how fantasy and reality bleed into each other. When the Escapist saves the day, we see both the beautiful lie and the crushing truth.

The Escapist can’t escape the real world.

Opera is Cinema. Cinema is Opera.

The production and score borrow significantly from familiar cues of superhero cinema. Which is not a bad thing. It modernizes the operatic form by leveraging and subverting those tropes. Mason Bates knows exactly what he’s doing—you can practically hear Elfman’s Batman score peek through. There’s even some of the anxiety of Zimmer’s Avengers theme.

The special effects are the type of live production design that one can only really find at the Met. The scale, height and depth of the stage allow for a mix of stagecraft, digital projection, wire work and special effects that give the feeling you’re watching a movie unfold live in front of you.

Comic panels literally transform into three-dimensional space. Luna Moth doesn’t just appear—she flies on wires across the Met’s massive stage. Influences of superhero cinema like Burton’s Batman, Beatty’s Dick Tracy, and Raimi’s Spider-Man are easy to spot in the production.

There are so many connections between early cinema and opera, you can’t fail to see the cinema giving back to a production like Kavalier & Clay in such an impressive manner. The medium that opera birthed comes home to pay its respects in this production.

Its scale is immersive. Overwhelming.

Four-Color Performances

The four main leads are outstanding—with Sun-Ly Pierce as Rosa Saks the clear standout.

When she sings the aria creating the heroine Luna Moth—drawing hope into existence from her grief—the entire house goes silent. This is what opera can do that nothing else can: make you feel the weight of history through one human voice.

Andrzej Filończyk as Joe Kavalier carries the weight of survivor’s guilt in every gesture. Miles Mykkanen’s Sam Clay perfectly captures the wise-cracking surface hiding closeted pain. Edward Nelson’s Tracy Bacon—the voice of the Escapist on radio—makes his doomed love affair with Sam genuinely heartbreaking.

Having only heard the music live and in performance, it’s impossible to judge it in total. I can say that several of the numbers—including Rosa’s memorable aria creating Luna Moth and the prayers of Joe Kavalier’s lost family—have not left my thoughts since Friday.

I look forward to the Met’s radio broadcast so I can listen in full.

The Amazing Adventures of Bob and Willa

The opera’s questions about America resonated even more when, less than 24 hours later, I sat down to watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another—his $140 million screwball revolutionary epic about Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio), a washed-up radical trying to save his daughter Willa from forces Joe Kavalier would recognize all too well.

These are wildly different works but they’re both asking the exact same question about America.

Is America meant to be a refuge?

How do fathers protect their daughters in a world gone mad?

Joe Kavalier can’t save his sister on the Ark of Miriam. Bob and Willa barely escape their revolutionary past. Bob’s old comrades in the French ‘75 are still fighting their delusional war. The FBI raids Sam’s world while claiming to protect America. The Christmas Adventurers destroy lives for their cause.

Everyone’s fighting for their version of America.

But the only real heroes are those who choose family over ideology. Sam and Rosa raise Sarah after Joe disappears. Bob and Willa survive together.

And while both works confront moments of deep tragedy and violence brought forth by inhumanity—these choices leave us with light as their coda.

As Rosa sings: “Choose hope even though it’s hopeless. Come home. Come home. Come home.”

Their hope are their daughters. Young lives who embodies real promise.

“She was an American girl.”

An Opera for Our Times

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is what modern American opera can and should be! Not dusty European imports! Not safe revivals!

Our story—immigrants and outsiders drawing themselves as heroes while the world burns around them. Finding love and connection and yes heroism amidst the deepest human tragedy!

The Met took a real risk here. It paid off spectacularly.

Go see it!

Five performances remain through October 11th. Family Circle seats start at $65. Far less than you’d pay for mediocre Broadway!

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC , Gustavo Dudamel, conductor, September 19th 2025 at Lincoln Center, performing Lanzilotti’s of light and stone, Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3, and Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 2

Row AA, Seats 101, 102

Since March, Cognitive Frames has practiced democratic criticism for film. Today we expand to live performance.

Cognitive Frames: In the Room covers live performance and cultural events: symphony, opera, theater, concerts, film festivals, art openings—anywhere culture happens in real time.

We know that every perspective illuminates something different. The film student sees techniques the regular subscriber doesn't notice; the subscriber knows the director's journey the student hasn't tracked. Someone's first Broadway show, someone's hundredth time at Film Forum, someone finally trying opera or rediscovering jazz—each viewpoint reveals what others can't see.

We want to cover it all: galleries, readings, dance, anywhere culture lives. Your perspective matters.

Today: Dudamel's opening week at the NY Phil with 21-year-old pianist Yunchan Lim playing Bartók's final concerto.

This fall: The Met's world premiere of Kavalier & Clay, the 63rd New York Film Festival, Jane Krakowski in Oh, Mary!, and much more.

Traditional media criticism might be shrinking. Real conversations about culture are just beginning.

Want to write about something you witnessed? Email us: submissions@cognitivefilms.org

– D.H.

The last time I saw someone this intense playing the piano live was Tori Amos at the Beacon Theater in 1992.

But Bartók's Third Piano Concerto is considerably more complicated than "Cornflake Girl."

That's how 21-year-old Yunchan Lim announced himself Tuesday night at David Geffen Hall—not as the prodigy who became the youngest-ever Van Cliburn winner at 18, but as a rock star (or K-Pop star) that had full command of the stage, the audience and the music.

My brother and I had just come from Sugarfish, properly fortified with salmon and yellowtail, walking down Broadway on one of those perfect September evenings that are one more proof point that New York City is the greatest of all cities.

He's more of a Phish fan—has probably seen them 100+ times—but he's been getting increasingly classical-pilled lately. This performance definitely pushed him further down that rabbit hole.

World-class sushi and sake at 6 and world-class Bartók at 7:30. This is the blessing of New York: everything you could want culturally is a subway ride away, and sometimes it all converges on a single Tuesday night on the Upper West Side.

The Final Performance Energy

This was the last of five performances of Gustavo Dudamel's opening week as Music & Artistic Director Designate. You could feel it in the orchestra—that particular energy of a final performance where everything's been worked out but hasn't gotten stale.

Dudamel programmed an argument about America: Hawaiian composer Leilehua Lanzilotti's world premiere of light and stone, Bartók dying in exile on the Upper West Side, and Charles Ives cramming every American tune he could remember into a symphony that waited fifty years for its premiere.

Let me be clear about something: I am admittedly new to the world of classical music performance. For the last year or so, I've primarily seen the Met Orchestra. They are so, so wonderful.

But the NY Philharmonic under Dudamel is something different. The hype is 100% real.

The Hawaiian Sunrise

Lanzilotti's of light and stone opened the evening—a 15-minute evocation of King Kalākaua's 1888 birthday celebration when he flooded Iolani Palace with Edison's brand-new electric lights. The piece moves through four interpretations of the word "haku": to compose, core (as in stone), to rise up (as the moon), to braid (as a lei).

At times it captured something like the sunrise feeling of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé. At others, I felt it decomposing into "classical chill" playlist music. Admittedly, this could be my lack of familiarity with the piece. I need to hear it more before rendering any real judgment. But there were undeniable moments—the clarinet's mournful second movement solo, the way the woodwinds braided together in the third like the lei of the title.

The Hungarian in New York

Bela Bartok was dying while writing his Third Piano Concerto. Leukemia. Living blocks from Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side after fleeing Nazi oppression. He managed to finish everything except the last 17 bars of orchestration, which his student Tibor Serly completed. It was meant as a vehicle for his pianist wife to perform and stay financially afloat after his death.

You can hear all of this in the music—the mix of melancholy, excitement, chaos, and beauty he found in New York. Which of course is why Dudamel picked it. This concerto is New York explaining itself to itself. A dying Hungarian exile trying to capture what he heard walking these same streets we'd just walked from dinner.

Lim didn't just play this piece. He inhabited it.

Dudamel and Lim have an obvious and easy chemistry. You could feel their bond particularly during the second movement, the Adagio religioso, which demands a slower, contemplative pace. Lim smoldered through these passages—deeply in conversation with the orchestra and conductor. The normally subdued opening became something sparkling, alive.

The third movement dials the intensity back up with its modernist jangle of chaos. Bartók is very much the Hungarian in New York in this passage. Lim brought both the sparkle and the weight, making each gesture feel both independent and part of the larger puzzle.

Is he the best piano player alive? I am in no way capable of judging that. Did he blow my mind? Hell yeah he did.

He deserved every one of his four standing ovations.

Before finally dashing offstage, Lim played a modest encore—a 19th-century waltz called "This Quiet Summer Night" by Feofil Tolstoy (no relation). After the Bartók, it felt like someone offering you a glass of water after you'd been drinking absinthe.

Ives and the American Story

Charles Ives' Symphony No. 2 was played impeccably.

Ives wrote this piece in the early years of the 20th century, and aside from a few local school performances, kept it in a proverbial drawer while he pursued a highly successful career in insurance. (There's something deeply American about that—our greatest experimental composer selling insurance while sweet, lyrical Brahmsian music poured out of him.)

In February 1951, Ives was too nervous to attend Leonard Bernstein's premiere with this very orchestra, preferring to listen on the radio. Of that performance, the New York Herald Tribune critic Virgil Thomson wrote that the Second Symphony "speaks of American life with love and humor and faith. It is unquestionably an authentic work of art, both as structure and as communication."

After one of the toughest weeks in America in recent memory, the performance was catharsis. I can only imagine that Lenny would've been proud.

Dudamel conducted the orchestra with lyrical power. He danced as if attending the Fourth of July picnic evoked by the music. He summoned greater emotion from his first chairs by getting deeply in their faces and demanding more.

The Brahmsian sections were gorgeous—lush sound, beautiful flow. The American tunes that emerge throughout—"Columbia, Gem of the Ocean," "America the Beautiful," "Camptown Races"—were handled with grace if not quite abandon. That's the thing about Ives—he makes you hear your own country differently.

His reflections on the music of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era evokes a sonic landscape of people ultimately finding a way of harmonizing.

The Orchestra as Point of Light

These are dark times. But the American experience is so much more than violence and polarization and anger. It is also a young composer having her work played alongside the great modernists of American music. It is Bela Bartok fleeing oppression and pouring his heart into one last expression of life, brought alive by a 21 year-old from Korea.

And when Dudamel stepped into the violin section during the Ives, when he locked eyes with principal cellist Carter Brey, when he drew out that extra bit of brass in the finale—he fully involved the audience in that conversation about American history — and glory.

This is what live performance offers that recordings can't. The specific energy of this room on this night with these people.

The intensity is not that different from Citi Field after Juan Soto hits a home run, or the crowd sings My Girl when Francisco Lindor1 steps to the plate.

Real human connection between performer, audience and ability transcends into something greater.

New York City is special because all of this is available — if you choose to seek it.

Seek out the NY Philharmonic when Gustavo Dudamel is in town. Guaranteed home run.

Gustavo Dudamel returns to the NY Philharmonic throughout the season before officially taking over as Music & Artistic Director in 2026. Student rush tickets are available for most performances.

Doug Hesney is founder and president of the Cognitive Film Society. This is the first piece in "Cognitive Frames: In the Room," our new section covering live performance from the perspective of ticket-buying audiences.

“A taste for music, a taste for anything, is an ability to consume it with pleasure. Taste in music is preferential consumption, a greater liking for certain kinds of it than others…

And the pleasures of taste, at best are transitory, since nobody, professional or layman, can be sure that what he finds beautiful this year may not be just another piece of music to him next.

The best any of us can do about any piece, short of memorizing its actual sounds and storing it away intact against lean musical moments, is to consult his appetite about its immediate consumption, his appetite and his digestive experience.

And after consumption to argue about the thing interminably with all his friends.

De gustibus disputandum est,”

- Virgil Thomson, “Taste in Music”, The New York Herald Tribune (1940)

As music and culture critic for New York Herald Tribune during the WWII era, Virgil Thomson brought his skills as a composer to his influential columns and performance reviews. Intellectually fierce and clear in his preferences, Thomson championed a plain spoken approach to music criticism.

In the same article, Thomson explained his critical philosophy:

“The leaders of taste can no more create deliberately a mode in music than advertising campaigns can make popular a product that the public doesn’t want. They can only manipulate a trend. And trends follow folk patterns.

That is why unsuccessful or unfashionable music, music that seems to ignore what the rest of the world is listening to, is sometimes the best music, the freest, the most original — though there is no rule about that either”

This “middlebrow” approach understood that American tastes were open to a broad cross-section of musical influences — one that was free from old conventions and open to new ideas. One that placed the Viennese school of Mozart, Beethoven and Bach on the same level as the “Hot Jazz” that was evolving daily in the clubs a few Avenues over from his offices.

Open to cross-influence, and concerned with complexity, virtuoso performance and popular impact — this American approach to music criticism championed an era of “middlebrow” excellence.

When The New York Times reassigned four of its senior culture critics this summer - it was the final indication that the era of “middlebrow” criticism that championed excellence across American music culture was completely dead.

Charlotte Klein’s official obituary of rich cultural criticism for New York Magazine was filled with the sort of concern one might express to one’s mother when she calls asking why “MSNBC” is changing its name to “MSNOW”. Klein noted how the Chicago Tribune's film critic position disappeared for the first time since the 1950s, how the Washington Post and Vanity Fair shed longtime critics, how even the Associated Press ended its weekly book reviews after decades.

Klein introduced us to what Hearing Things founder Ryan Dombal calls "cool hunting" criticism—content focused on "sifting through the deluge of music that's put out every single day."

This curatorial approach represents something fundamentally different from Thomson's vision. Thomson digested and argued while today's criticism merely sorts and recommends. Where he saw criticism as democratic dialogue, algorithms see it as content curation.

But every ending creates an opening.

Cognitive Frames: In the Room

In the Room is our new journal of live music and event criticism.

By extending the democratic approach we’ve brought cinema to live performance we believe we can revive the lively middlebrow discussions of the Thomson era.

Thomson knew that "trends follow folk patterns." Real cultural movements don't start in critics' rows; they emerge from the full house, from every price point, from the democratic mix of perspectives that creates genuine dialogue.

We want to be in the room, so we can be in the discussion.

What We’re Covering this Fall

Our inaugural reviews will cover Gustavo Dudamel's opening week as the NY Philharmonic's Music Director Designate (September 11-16), featuring 22-year-old sensation Yunchan Lim performing Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 3.

Dudamel's appointment represents a generational shift at the Philharmonic, while Lim—who stunned the classical world winning the Van Cliburn Competition at 18—brings fresh perspective to Bartók's final masterpiece, composed during the Hungarian composer's exile in New York.

We'll follow this with the Metropolitan Opera's world premiere production of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which opens September 21 and runs through October 11. Mason Bates and Gene Scheer's adaptation of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel perfectly embodies our belief in artistic porousness: a story about Jewish comic book creators fighting fascism through Superman-like fantasies, now becoming opera at America's most prestigious house.

One of our favorite books of the aughts—we're excited to see how the Met transforms ’s epic about art, exile, and the birth of superheroes into opera.

November brings Cole Escola's "Oh, Mary!" (November 8)—the Tony Award-winning comedy that reimagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a cabaret-obsessed alcoholic in the weeks before her husband's assassination.

Our trips to the Met continue with Mozart's Don Giovanni (November 15) and Strauss's Arabella (November 22).

We'll also be covering the 63rd New York Film Festival (September 26-October 13), bringing this same democratic approach to America’s most prestigious film showcase—from whatever screenings we can get into on our 6 film pass.

Join Us In The Room

“De Gustibus Disputandum Est” - Virgil Thomson reversed the old Latin maxim—he believed we SHOULD discuss taste. As the patron saint of “In The Room” we will follow his example.

Discussion itself is the point. Not to win, but to participate in the democratic conversation that keeps culture alive.

The veteran who's followed a band since dive bars brings different knowledge than the teenager discovering them at Governors Ball. The rush ticket holder at the Philharmonic, the all-day museum wanderer, the festival-goer choosing between three stages—each perspective illuminates something others miss.

We want to know why you bought that ticket, how you experienced the performance and the impression that it left.

In these polarized and often tragic times, we believe now is the time to recommit our public passions to art and music and human excellence.

We’re sharing what moves us. Share what moves you.

When professional criticism collapsed, we lost those conversations. What replaced them—algorithmic playlists, star ratings, recommendation engines—mistakes consumption for culture.

They can tell you what to listen to next but not why it matters. Only human experience can do that.

Thomson's era had their discussions in newspaper columns and concert hall lobbies, in late-night diners after performances.

Substack allows us to create new spaces for those same vital and human conversations. Every perspective from every venue helps us understand what culture actually means to the people experiencing it.

Join us in the room. Share what moves you.

Look for our first review this week and send your submissions to submissions@cognitivefilms.org.