“By constantly recycling established works, we may remain trapped.”

Ian Crouch on “Parades End,” a five-part interpretation of Ford Madox Ford’s novel coming to HBO on Tuesday night, and television adaptations: http://nyr.kr/X9gXHX

Photograph by Nick Briggs.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Last week, I wrote a column about Lena Dunham’s HBO show “Girls.” I had a bunch of abstract, cranky, intellectual goals: I wanted to pluck “Girls” out of the debate about Millennials, for starters. I wanted to analyze its critical reception. I wanted to put the discussion of “privilege” in a different light. And I wanted to talk about “Girls” specifically as television.

But that’s just one way of doing criticism, and last night’s excellent episode, “One Man’s Trash,” deserves a more direct response…

Emily Nussbaum writes about the sex scene on last night’s episode of “Girls”: http://nyr.kr/XCn2KG

  Emily Nussbaum on Girls, Enlightened and the power of the alienating TV heroine: http://nyr.kr/XNMKJV

(Source: newyorker.com)

Richard Brody on the increasing gap between Lena Dunham and the character she plays in “Girls”: “That gap doesn’t make Dunham’s characterization less personal, only less contemporary—a work of fiction in which she plays a character that draws on memories or imagines a road not taken, but which, either way, casts on herself a shadow of regret and self-doubt.”  Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Xz9obw

Photograph: HBO.

The latest segment of HBO’s four-part Witness series follows the French photojournalist Véronique de Viguerie in South Sudan, where thousands have been murdered, kidnapped, or displaced by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

Watch a clip from the film (which aired last night on HBO), and click-through for more from Maria Lokke on de Viguerie.

Hendrik Hertzberg on “Crossfire Hurricane,” a new documentary directed by Brett Morgen:

If you watch it, and you ought to if you have any interest in or curiosity about the Stones, by all means crank up the volume—spouses, roommates, and neighbors permitting, all the way to eleven.

Continue reading.

Photograph: Rolling Stones Archive/HBO.

Also read: Richard Brody on “Charlie is my Darling,” a documentary about the Stones in 1965.

David Denby, In Defense of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom”: http://nyr.kr/MATGcp

I loved Emily Nussbaum’s negative review of Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO series, “The Newsroom,” which had its première last Sunday night, but I also enjoyed the show—certainly more than she did—and, afterwards, I felt a kind of moviegoer’s chagrin. 

If you’re planning to watch Aaron Sorkin’s new show “The Newsroom,” which premieres tonight on HBO, you may want to think again: http://nyr.kr/MsynVN

Richard Brody on why he thinks that the finale of “Girls” was “one of the best movies I’ve seen so far this year”: http://nyr.kr/KvUyzd