Film, Music, Opera, Art & Theater Critic + European Cultural Correspondent @nytimes, @wsj, @ft, @jdforward, @vanmusicmag https://xitter.cf/t.co/LoDyDYRZOD
Munich / Berlin / New York
Joined August 2009
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It was a great honor to write the @nytimes obit for Alexander Kluge, a brilliant & influential artist & thinker whose work is too little known in the English-speaking world. Alexander Kluge, Lodestar in New German Cinema Movement, Dies at 94 nytimes.com/2026/03/27/movie… via @NYTimes
A highly perceptive review of Lance Hammer’s “Queen at Sea,” which, along with Grant Gee’s “Everybody Digs Bill Evans,” was a highlight of this year’s #Berlinale, where Anna Calder-Marshall & Tom Courtenay shared an award for their shattering performances. libertiesjournal.com/online-…
Lance Hammer's new feature, Queen at Sea, with extraordinary performances by Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall, is far clearer and deeper on conflicts of family life and civic power than the wrongly acclaimed
Fjord:
newyorker.com/culture/the-fr…
The year Steve Reich was born the Spanish Civil War began, Berlin hosted the olympics, Eugene O'Neill got the Nobel & Mutiny on the Bounty won Best Picture.
Reich doesn't seem to have aged since his 70th birthday bash @carnegiehall, which I wrote about @ColumbiaSpec.
עד 120!
Mothers of Kherson @Opera_Narodowa recalls earlier operatic responses prompted by the war in #Ukraine, including @bay_staatsoper's 2023 production of Prokofiev’s War & Peace, which Dmitri Tcherniakov & Vladimir Jurowski read against the grain as a protest of violence & pageantry
As well as Simon McBurney’s grim and mournful Khovanshchina at the 2025 #SalzburgEasterFestival, also a @MetOpera co-production, which examined Russian history through the prism of its bloody & repressive present.
I reviewed "Mothers of Kherson" for @WSJ:
wsj.com/arts-culture/theater…
I just discovered that a ponderous line in @benshapiro's "Confession" that's attributed to Pushkin - "Better the illusions that exalt us than 10,000 truths" - comes VERBATIM from an episode of the 90s sci-fi TV show Babylon 5. You can't make this sh*t up!
ajgoldmann.substack.com/p/be…
Why James Franco thought playing a Dostoevsky-quoting Soviet interrogator in Ben Shapiro’s Stalin-era thriller was a good way to make a post-#MeToo comeback is bewildering.
The pain of watching “Confession” is only mitigated by its unintentional hilarity. ajgoldmann.substack.com/p/be…
What does it means to make art about calamity in the midst of catastrophe? Few musical monuments to wartime horrors were written during the events they depict. @WSJ my take on Maxim Kolomiiets’s “Mothers of Kherson” @Opera_Narodowa, a @MetOper coproduction
wsj.com/arts-culture/theater…
No surprise here, but @benshapiro's Stalin-era interrogation drama "Confession" is grim, ghastly & pompous. It's a bizarre comeback vehicle for James Franco - & bizarro that Nick Nolte & Jennifer Jason Leigh are in this. My review, now up at The Feuilleton
substack.com/home/post/p-221…
A week out from @deutsche_oper's new DER FLIEGENDE HOLLÄNDER a teaser just dropped w/some puzzling visuals & text:
When Milo Rau takes on Wagner
Major questions are posed
The eternal search for redemption
From Wagner to German guilt
Wagner in Israel?
...the ghosts of the past...
When I found this at my neighborhood Oxfam last week for €2.50, I should have known it was a sign…
From Ken Russell’s script to Oliver Reed’s performance: a side-by-side comparison with continuity supervisor Ann Skinner’s original script.
KEN RUSSELL’S THE DEVILS opens in theaters 10.16 for one week only: thedevils.movie
For @forward, I wrote about the widespread campaign, amplified by German media, to discredit the far-left Die Linke, which triumphed in last month's Berlin elections. The charge being leveled against the party: rank & systemic anisemitism @dielinkeberlin
forward.com/opinion/853877/d…
Yesterday, 5 naked women wearing harnesses scrubbed the facade of @Volksbuehne in Florentina Holzinger’s opening Aktion for the rededication
/reconsecration of the legendary East Berlin theater, which looks to its new artistic director, Matthias Lilienthal, for artistic renewal.
One of the best all-time trade publication headlines. @Variety
'NAZA' Beats 'Avengers: Endgame Encore' to Top Italian Box Office variety.com/2026/film/global…
So glad to see this shout-out to Carl Schorske & his fascinating analysis of Theodor Herzl & antiliberal political movements in fin-de-siècle Vienna, in Michael S. Roth's @nytimes withering review of Ben Moser's "Anti-Zionism."
nytimes.com/2026/09/22/books…
A milestone @deutsche_oper: the DE premiere of Mittwoch aus LICHT, the final opera in Maxime Pascal’s full Stockhausen cycle. An incisive & holistic performance @Le_Balcon, the DOB chorus & string quartet (aloft), illustrated by Susanne Kennedy & Markus Selg’s slop-heavy staging.
Here’s my @nytimes feature about Pascal’s nearly decade-long bid to conduct the entire 30+ hour septology. He still hopes to someday present the fully-staged cycle - dirs. Lazar, Bigourdan, Huffman, Costa, Kennedy). nytimes.com/2025/11/14/arts/…
