What a thankless time it is to be molding young minds, at least in the movies. The grouchy literature professor in "American Fiction," played by Jeffrey Wright, makes the mistake of teaching Flannery O'Connor, and is rewarded with a leave of absence. A nastier fate awaits Nicolas Cage's evolutionary-biology professor in "Dream Scenario," who becomes, for an inexplicably large swath of the population, a nebbishy figure of nightmares-a sad-sack Freddy Krueger. Both movies are to some extent poking fun at the thin skins and trigger warnings of contemporary campus culture, but Paul Giamatti's nineteen-seventies ancient-history teacher, in "The Holdovers," fares little better, stuck during the Christmas holidays at a boarding school as frigid and isolated as the Overlook Hotel.
The weather is just as chilly and the classrooms just as cheerless in "About Dry Grasses," the latest epic of wintry discontent by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. We are in eastern Anatolia, where craggy mountain roads and stretches of steppe lie blanketed by heavy snow; not until the season changes, near the end of a formidable three hours and seventeen minutes, do the desiccated yellow blades of the title push their way into the frame. Until then, we must make do with the prickly company of Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an art teacher who's finishing up his fourth and-he hopes final year at this remote outpost, a stint mandated by Turkey's public-education system. Our first glimpse of Samet, a tiny speck trudging across a blinding-white landscape, is a typical Ceylan overture: a lone figure dwarfed, spectacularly, by a terrain that reflects his inner desolation. Funny thing is, the closer we get to Samet, the smaller he seems; his outward affability soon melts away, exposing a heart of pettiest permafrost. That, too, is typical of Ceylan: he never mistakes a protagonist for a hero.
Esta historia es de la edición March 04, 2024 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición March 04, 2024 de The New Yorker.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
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RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.