Deborah Krieger

People who know me know that I will take any opportunity to discuss my favorite movie of 2015, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Whether it’s Armie Hammer’s warbling Russian accent, Henry Cavill in a three-piece suit, delicious polyamorous shipping fodder, “It. Doesn’t. Have. To Match.,” or the scene where Cavill and Alicia Vikander zipline over the Berlin Wall, there’s nothing I don’t love about this slick, fashionable, trope-tastic miracle of a movie.

Jeff Williams’ and Letha Wilson’s two-person show at FJORD, After Cities, forces me to consider a sobering reality: what does the end of the city look like? And what does it mean for the future of humanity?

Buoyed by the audience's clear enthusiasm and by lead singer Davy Carton's pure charisma, the Saw Doctors bring their A-game, showing why they're the most beloved and enduring Irish rock outfit not led by Bono.

The problems, from an entertainment standpoint, come when Schönhaus or one of the other three will describe an event, and then we cut immediately to their respective actor, playing out that exact same event. It’s a strange combination of both showing and telling, and it comes across as incredibly repetitive.

Resist does start off on the wrong foot both musically and thematically, and it ends up coloring the experience of the album in its entirety. Perhaps it's a case of "resistance fatigue", but for a band to call an album Resist, and to have generic lyrics about tears and blood and fighting the war for freedom, rings incredibly hollow—almost on the level of creative inertia displayed by the last few Muse albums.

While it never becomes preposterously cartoonish, the divide between Halla’s desperation to protect that beautiful Icelandic landscape and the government’s desire for control over it and over Iceland’s people becomes clearer and clearer over the course of the narrative.

It’s like the classic riddle: what casts a shadow but cannot be seen? In Soaking Up Local Color, Chinn Wang’s solo show at Philadelphia’s Print Center, the answer might be something like “the past” or “history” or “family heritage.”

Cecilia Vicuña’s first major solo exhibition presents a delicate balancing act between the large- and small-scale, and between works that are explicitly political and those that are more personal. Combining textiles, video, found objects, wood, paper, poetry, and more, ‘About to Happen’ is grounded in the artist’s dedication to her craft and to her advocacy, often making the most impact with the most intimate, fragile works.

But beneath his calm veneer of expertise, Ruben Brandt is suffering in a truly isolating way: these culturally ubiquitous objects of art that have so much beauty and meaning for everyone else have been causing him psychic and even real physical pain, and nothing he does seems to help.

In Legends Never Die: A Collective Memory, Guadalupe Rosales makes a case for the role of the artist as curator and preserver of history when official accounts fail to tell the entire story.

Distance Over Time is not going to break the mold, or revolutionize the form—indeed, the longest song on the album is under ten minutes, which is a marvel of brevity from Dream Theater—but it's got some of the best songs they've released since parting ways with Mike Portnoy.

It’s winter somewhere in New Jersey; or maybe it’s always been cold like this, the ground covered in gray slush, the sky bleak and metallic. For Nancy (Andrea Riseborough), every day is the same, given over to a listless temp jobs and to caring for a sick, nosy mother (Ann Dowd), whose dull complaining and moaning roars in the background like so much white noise.

If Good Omens is an artifact of 1990's apocalypse hullabaloo notable for its wry wit, petty divine figures, and surrealistic flourishes, then The World Is a Narrow Bridge plays a similar role in our angst-ridden, oversaturated media landscape/world of 2016 and beyond.

I know I’m in for a treat when a Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts show is in the Richard C. von Hess Foundation Works on Paper Gallery. It’s an intimate three-room space with low ceilings and warm, gentle light, making it perfect for taking in prints, drawings, or, as in the case of Zanele Muholi and The Women's Mobile Museum, photography.

Because I’m rarely satisfied with museum shows as simple collections of beautiful objects, regardless of how beautiful the objects are, I found Little Ladies lacking when it came to a more rigorous level of analysis of why these objects were so vital for viewers to consider in the 21st century.