Moze Halperin

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  performance April 2023

  VILLAGE VANGUARD

  A CRAMPED LIVING ROOM appears like a diorama of 1960s Greenwich Village bohemia, afloat in the engulfing expanse of the Harvey Theater’s stage. It contains all the warmth and ire and humanity that get bottled up in a typical New York apartment: a whole world unfolding with nowhere to go. The chasmic darkness of America waits just outside its cozily art-covered walls.

  Incendiary optimism, depicted as a necessity in life and politics, suffuses Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), staged this past February and March by Anne Kauffman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in

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  performance March 17, 2023

  Village Vanguard

  A CRAMPED LIVING ROOM appears like a diorama of 1960s Greenwich Village bohemia, afloat in the engulfing expanse of the Harvey Theater’s stage. It contains all the warmth and ire and humanity that get bottled up in a typical New York apartment: a whole world unfolding with nowhere to go. The chasmic darkness of America waits just outside its cozily art-covered walls.

  Incendiary optimism, depicted as a necessity in life and politics, suffuses Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), which runs until March 24 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it is being staged

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  film November 21, 2022

  Hungry Heart

  IF ’80S CINEMA experienced a “cannibal boom” by way of Italian exploitation flicks, the ’00s/’10s zeitgeist’s deviant gourmand was the libidinous vampire. At a time when many complained sex was disappearing from film, a glut of horny American mainstream cultural phenomena (most notably True Blood, Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and The Originals) took cues from Anne Rice and transferred desire onto the undead. The vile parasites, once mythical scapegoats for pestilence in pockets of Eastern Europe, were rebranded as soulful fuck machines and brooding suburban classmates, dousing normie sexuality

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  film August 25, 2022

  Once More, with Feeling

  IN EPISODE THREE of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, an affable woman in glasses, sitting in a Raising Cane’s booth overlooking a vast and lonely soundstage, dips a chicken finger into a tub of sauce, lifts it millimeters from her mouth, smiles at an unseen someone across from her as she jovially bites the air three times, then places the intact poultry prop down. The distance between the zealous extra’s smacking lips and the chicken is negligible, and yet, metaphorically, it encapsulates the entire series’ edging relationship to the meticulous art of connection. 

  The Rehearsal’s stated attempts

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  film April 27, 2022

  Norse Majeure

  DIRECTED BY ROBERT EGGERS and cowritten with Sjón, the Icelandic novelist and poet responsible for the Björk lyric “I’m a fountain of blood / in the shape of a girl,” The Northman is set within the stark corners of Viking life and expansion during the tenth century, evoking the era’s sundry pieties and incessant cruelty—a lucid vision of the eternal strangeness of us skin-encased fountains of blood looking to myth for aggrandizement and purpose. The film’s protagonist is a Norse pagan warrior who identifies as a “bear-wolf” and plucks a man’s throat out with his teeth. Despite being a force of

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  film December 06, 2021

  Haute Mess

  THE HOUSE OF GUCCI trailers and the House of Gucci movie are distinct cultural objects. The former appeared to have been edited in the cutting room of RuPaul’s Drag Race, pouring generously into the bottomless Bellini of camp Lady Gaga serves gay culture. Complete with baffling accent slips (was there a little too much vodka, the commentariat wondered, in Lady Gaga’s penne?), a blasphemous new Holy Trinity, and the foreboding power of a tiny spoon meeting the rim of a demitasse, they achieved cult status months before the film itself even existed.  

  That film, written by Becky Johnston and Roberto

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  film May 12, 2021

  Pain Quotidian

  RIGID, ASHEN, AND CAMOUFLAGED against backgrounds intricately rendered in fifty shades of greige, characters throughout Roy Andersson’s 2014 A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence repeat the line “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine.” Paired with the likes of a tortured, electrode-bound lab monkey and a man in an office on the brink of suicide—not to mention the entire film’s haunting by one Boschian vision of colonial terror—this recurring utterance becomes a searingly insipid punch line. Andersson, in Pigeon and the other two films in his “Living Trilogy,” depicts the symbiosis of

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  film December 15, 2020

  Tourist Trap

  JAPAN AND UZBEKISTAN have a friends-with-benefits relationship, one that sees the world’s third-largest economy and its sogo shosha investing in and importing the formerly-Soviet Central Asian nation’s resources—some radioactive (uranium), some laxative (dried fruit)—and bolstering a miscellany of Uzbek projects, from industrial modernization to Covid-19 response to tourism. Such a transactional bond doesn’t exactly sound like the stuff from which movies are made. 

  Yet Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Tourism, its national cinema agency Uzbekkino, and a handful of Japanese production companies teamed up