Arts

Columns

An Everyday Art Tour: A unique statement

By Sophie Herron | February 5

Ellie Ayati Jian began her career as a milliner by coincidence. Originally trained as an architect and interior designer, she stepped into the world of hat-making when a friend asked her to enter the contest for the Longines Prize for Elegance at the Belmont Stakes, a fashion contest in New York. When Jian couldn’t find a fascinator to match her outfit, she decided to make one instead, ultimately winning the prize for most elegant look of the day.

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Theater

‘The Cloud Collector’ explores imagination and identity

By Spring LaRose | January 30

This abridged production of the musical “The Cloud Collector” is part of The Rockwell’s Work-in-Progress Showcase, a series that allows artists to workshop pieces for a live audience. The show tells the story of Hazel (Robin Elmer), a young transgender playwright who reconnects with his lost girlhood in a fantasy dreamworld.

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Arts

‘The Rest of Our Lives’ is a meditative reflection on midlife

By Claire LeCates | January 28

The travelogue is a unique subgenre of American literature: A man goes on a journey, spiritual and physical, across America’s sprawling highways, and his trip is documented — either as fiction or memoir. Some of the most famed American authors, including John Steinbeck, Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac published, within these parameters and helped define the genre (publishing “Travels with Charley: In Search of America,” “Roughing it” and “On the Road,” respectively).

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Columns

Evanescence and the Beautiful Foolishness of Things: East Asian art in global auctions

By Isabella Jin | January 26

The spectacle of the New York Sales auctions at Sotheby’s last November, which were headlined by Gustav Klimt’s “Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer” (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, 1914–16), sold for $236.4 million, is a great opportunity to introduce East Asian artworks that have set records at international auctions. 

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Arts

The case for physical media

By Brian Becker | January 22

To many of us, CDs and records are relics of the past. While they were once collected by our parents and grandparents to access music, the widespread use of the internet has given birth to digital media. The size of one’s collection slowly gave way to the strength of one’s internet connection as the primary measure of music accessibility.

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Arts

The ‘Stranger Things’ finale ends the show with some fizzles, some bangs

By Spring LaRose | January 15

The finale of the global phenomenon “Stranger Things” has been prophesied as one of the biggest television events of the 21st century. With five seasons spanning nine years, the show has grown both its audience and the scope of its story, tapping into, and in turn creating, a cultural zeitgeist. Now, the last episode is here.

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Arts

‘Resurrection’ is one of cinema’s most daring love letters

By Noah Goldstein | January 15

At this point, Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan’s career can largely be described as an anomaly. He’s 36, yet his films display a maturity that most fail to reach even in their later years. He comes from mainland China, infamous for its artistic censorship, but his work is some of the most innovative and expressive in world cinema today. His first two feature films, “Kaili Blues” (2015) and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (2018), were hypnotic in style and personal in philosophy, following protagonists as they ventured through Gan’s native Guizhou province in southwest China.

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Arts

Dove Ellis’ stunning gothic patchwork of a debut

By Sam Stearns | December 8

Dove Ellis is a young Irish singer-songwriter who just released his debut album, “Blizzard.” Although he is just at the beginning of a remarkable career, he must already be sufficiently tired of comparisons to Jeff Buckley.

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Arts

Tufts students take a walk in ‘The Imagined Forest’ at Symphony Hall

By Sam Stearns and Ellora Onion-De | December 5

In Boston’s Symphony Hall, beyond the sprawl of hallways and swinging double doors, there lies a room — the Rabb Room — where conversations take place under the hum of quiet classical music.  On Nov. 21, a group of Tufts students, led by their Music and Nature professor Jeremy Eichler, had ...

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Arts

The spy thriller as a geopolitical lens

By Annika Pillai | December 5

Though it may seem like mindless entertainment, spy fiction isn’t just about gadgets, secret codes or daring escapades. Rather, it’s a mirror for the world’s biggest fears. From 19th century diplomacy to today’s espionage, the genre has evolved alongside global conflicts, shifting power dynamics and the anxieties that shadow them. Every twist, betrayal and covert mission reveals something deeper — what societies dread, how they interpret danger and how they try to grasp control over the uncontrollable. In many ways, the evolution of the espionage thriller is a record of our collective fears written in ink and, now, on the big screen.

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Arts

Sherlock Holmes wishes you a Merry Christmas

By Sophie Herron | December 3

“Moriarty is dead, to begin with.” And after spending three years without his nemesis, master detective Sherlock Holmes is bored and depressed. No case in London tempts him, and he is estranged from his now-married friend Dr. John Watson, even refusing to come to his house for Christmas. Worse, he imagines that he sees Moriarty’s ghost around London. Gloomy, grouchy and very much not in the Christmas spirit, Holmes mopes alone on Christmas Eve — until a doctor asks him to investigate a mysterious death.

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Arts

‘It Was Just an Accident,’ masterfully captures a generation’s boiling anger and mistrust

By Dariush Raissi | December 3

To discuss director Jafar Panahi's newest film, “It Was Just an Accident,” it is important to understand its origins. The Iranian filmmaker is known for his unique style of portraying the lives of everyday Iranians through revealing their hopes and struggles to the audience. He is responsible for several renowned Iranian films, such as “Taxi,” “No Bears” and “3 Faces.” Beyond Iran, his movies have received international praise, winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, perhaps the most prestigious film award to date.

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Arts

Ira Sachs discusses capturing a vanished culture in ‘Peter Hujar’s Day’

By Noah Goldstein | November 25

In many ways, the artistic milieu that characterized 1970s New York is still being replicated today. Walk long enough around any neighborhood with hipsters, and you’re bound to find the likes of Patti Smith, Andy Warhol and Fran Leibowitz on a coffee shop table or bookstore display. 

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Arts

From stage to screen: The play, ‘Kim’s Convenience,’ that inspired the Netflix hit

By Fiona Hinrichsen | November 25

For fans of the TV sitcom “Kim’s Convenience,” the play delivers a sense of deja vu — it’s laugh-out-loud funny, brimming with witty banter and sharp humor. This play, which inspired the Netflix series, premiered in 2011 at the Toronto Fringe Festival. Playwright Ins Choi drew from his own experiences growing up in an immigrant Korean family in Canada. Adam Blanshay Productions presents the Soulpepper Theatre Company production in association with American Conservatory Theater, which runs at The Calderwood Pavilion from Nov. 6 to this Sunday.

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Arts

‘Hamnet’ breathes new life into Shakespeare

By Spring LaRose | November 24

William Shakespeare is, arguably, the most influential writer in history, with lines that have been parroted both in and out of the context of his plays for centuries. “Hamnet” is a testament to the timeless power of Shakespeare — for the long-cliched words “To be, or not to be,” somehow feel as fresh onscreen in 2025 as they must have onstage at the start of the 17th century. “Hamnet” is the newest film from director Chloé Zhao, based on the novel of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell. It is a work of historical fiction about the life of Shakespeare, focusing on his wife and children rather than his work.

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Arts

An everyday art tour: The art of keeping time

By Sophie Herron | November 24

Clockmaking runs in the family of Richard Hills, an antique horologist and owner of Hills Antique Clocks in Holliston. Throughout high school and college, he worked in his brother’s repair shop in Wellesley and, after graduating, continued clockmaking on the side while working as a bioanalytical chemist.

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Arts

Through the Looking Glass: What ‘The Wizard of Oz’ tells us about our current economic landscape

By Olivia Bye | November 21

Last week, “Wicked: For Good,” the sequel to last year’s box-office-shattering film based on the hit Broadway musical, made its highly-anticipated premiere in theatres. The film was officially released in theaters in the United States on Friday. Once again, the wonderfully weird world of Oz has been brought to our cultural forefront, with the film already projected to earn a record $200 million its opening weekend.

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Arts

Colleen Hoover’s ‘Regretting You’ delivers the drama, leaves the rest behind

By Annika Pillai | November 21

Colleen Hoover’s stories aren’t designed for subtlety, and “Regretting You” is no exception. The film unfolds with the same relentless pace as her novels — emotions spelled out in painful detail and absurd twists that land before the audience can catch its breath. It’s the kind of story that pushes for immediate reaction, even if it comes at the cost of overall quality. On screen, however, that approach feels uneven. The movie is so busy moving from one moment to the next that it rarely gives its story or characters time to land.

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Theater

What ‘The Great Comet’ reveals about human connection

By Sarin Chaimattayompol | November 20

To sit in the dark of Tufts’ Balch Arena Theater for 2 1/2 hours, watching a musical spun from Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” might sound like an exercise in masochism. Yet the experience turns out to be something far more delightful: a Russophilic, surprisingly tender and wonderfully inventive piece of theatrical adaptation.

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Arts

Arundhati Roy speaks her words of wisdom

By Ishaan Rajiv Rajabali | November 20

“Perhaps even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has just lost her most enthralling subject.” Arundhati Roy strikingly muses, cigarette in hand, on the cover of her latest memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me.” Her contemplative gaze masks emotional turmoil, audacious pluck and good ole’ mischief. Across 352 pages, she takes us through a life spent navigating uncharted waters with little trepidation. The unpredictable undercurrent of this stream is the eponymous character she describes as her “shelter and her storm:” Mary Roy.

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