The dazzling heights5/31/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() But he also brings quiet dignity to a conflicted immigrant’s experience. ![]() He’s a tour de force commanding the screen one flash of his charming grin could trigger seismic activity. The story centers around Usnavi, in a performance from lead Anthony Ramos that isn’t so much starmaking as it is a showcase for his constellation of talents. There’s no rival to the full-body sensory experience of a live musical, which makes it all the more remarkable when a creative team is able to not just mimic that, but enrich it on screen. In this movie treatment, they all wash over you, and then into you. There are earworms that could double as self-refilling serotonin boosters, while other songs are heart-splitting epiphanies about love, grief, community, and pride. The show’s score is its own ecstatic adrenaline shot. The surrealism whisks you away, but you’re never far from the feelings and relationships that pulse through the universe you know-all while shining a radiant spotlight on a community you might not. Unlike Hamilton, so transcendent on stage that a straightforward filming of the original Broadway cast was sufficient to keep its superfans “satisfied,” the cinematic adaptation of In the Heights excavates new treasures from the already ebullient production.Ĭhu’s vivacious staging of the musical numbers throughout New York City manages that magical thing of transporting you to another world while harnessing so much familiar emotion that you never feel closer to home. ![]()
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Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones5/31/2023 ![]() The moving story of their struggle to grow up-and survive- shimmers with the piercing, ineffable quality of childhood, as it captures all the hurts and little wins, the all-too-sudden changes, and the merciless, outside forces that can sweep the young into adulthood and forever shape their lives. ![]() Here fifth-grade classmates Tasha Baxter, Rodney Green, and Octavia Harrison will discover back-to-school means facing everyday challenges in a new world of safety lessons, terrified parents, and constant fear. It was the end of summer, a summer during the two-year nightmare in which Atlanta's African-American children were vanishing and twenty-nine would be found murdered by 1982. ![]() From the author of the Oprah's Book Club Selection An American Marriage, here is a beautifully evocative novel that proves why Tayari Jones is "one of the most important voices of her generation" ( Essence). ![]() ![]() ![]() Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, and describing how the Communist regime has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world. ![]() ![]() Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their “joy of betraying Big Brother,” as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest challenge to China’s authoritarian regime today. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among China’s educated, urban women. Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their joy of. ![]() The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. Verso: On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. ![]() |