Category: Aesthetics
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The Self That Must Be Chosen: Who We Are According to Søren Kierkegaard
He wrote under false names, spoke in riddles, and refused to give answers. He died at forty-two having produced, in a little over a decade, the most searching account of what it means to be a human being that Western philosophy has ever attempted. Kierkegaard did not want to make things easy for you. He…
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Sophie Calle
Encounters · No. 1 The Art of Following Someone Sophie Calle has spent forty years turning other people’s lives — and her own grief — into something that looks, uncomfortably, like art. By Bergotte In January 1980, Sophie Calle followed a stranger to Venice. She had met him briefly at a party in Paris, not…
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Who Are You at the Dinner Table? The Invite — Review
Director: Olivia WildeScreenplay: Rashida Jones and Will McCormackStarring: Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, Edward NortonYear: 2026Country: United StatesGenre: Comedy-drama / chamber comedyRunning time: 107 minutesBased on: Cesc Gay’s Sentimental (2020), released internationally as The People UpstairsRating: ★★★★☆ What It Is Joe and Angela are a long-married San Francisco couple whose relationship has calcified into…
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The Reel Argument: Ingmar Bergman
By Bergotte Ingmar Bergman made films about the things we cannot say to each other, and he made them with a directness that is almost unbearable. He is routinely described as a difficult filmmaker — demanding, austere, heavy — and this reputation has kept more people from him than it has drawn in, which is…
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The Beginning of the End of the Story: Departure(s) — Review
Author: Julian BarnesTitle: Departure(s)Year: 2026Genre: Literary fictionForm: A late novel / elegiac fictionRating: ★★★★★ What It Is Departure(s) is Julian Barnes’s declared final book: a brief, formally elusive work that moves between fiction, memoir, literary essay and autobiography while refusing to settle comfortably into any one of them. Barnes’s own website describes it as fiction…
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Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
Director: Sasha WatersTitle: Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the WorldYear: 2026Country: United StatesGenre: Documentary / BiographyRunning time: 91 minutesRating: ★★★★☆ What It Is Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is Sasha Waters’s documentary portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Mary Oliver, whose deceptively simple poems about nature, solitude, mortality,…
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The Human Condition According to Tolstoy
By Bergotte Leo Tolstoy is the writer who makes other great writers feel provincial. Not because his books are the longest, though two of them are among the longest ever written, and not because his range is the widest, though it extends from the ballrooms of Moscow to the battlefields of Austerlitz to the peasant…
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Issey Miyake
Encounters · No. 6 A Piece of Cloth Issey Miyake survived the atomic bomb at seven years old and spent the rest of his life making clothes that felt like freedom. These two facts are not unrelated. By Bergotte On the morning of August 6, 1945, Issey Miyake was seven years old and standing close…
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Outline by Rachel Cusk — Review
Author: Rachel CuskTitle: OutlineFirst published: 2014Genre: Literary fictionLength: approximately 250 pages (256 pages in the Picador paperback edition)Series: Outline Trilogy, Book OneRating: ★★☆☆☆ What It Is Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a novel constructed largely through ten conversations. Its narrator, Faye, is a writer who travels to Athens to teach a summer creative-writing course. During her…
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The Play Hiding Inside a Cocktail Party: T.S. Eliot’s Strangest Success
What This Play Is The Cocktail Party is a verse drama by T.S. Eliot, first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949 before transferring to the West End and Broadway, where it won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. By the time he wrote it, Eliot was already the most famous poet writing in…
