Since 2010, such directors as Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Sofia Coppola have made their movies without studio financing, thereby often enjoying more creative freedom than previously. Schrader, who has been directing movies since 1978, has been an enthusiastic adopter of this production mode; his film "The Canyons" (2013) was crowdfunded on Kickstarter. His recent trio of independent movies-"First Reformed" (2017), "The Card Counter" (2021), and "Master Gardener" (2022)-offers scathing visions of corrupted American institutions through dramas of individuals whose repentance takes destructive forms. Constituting a kind of trilogy about expiation through violencewhether toward others or toward oneself the films have a newfound starkness that reflects the severity of their subjects. Schrader's latest, "Oh, Canada," is his freest yet in terms of form, and, in its way, also presents his most extreme depiction of a fallen life. It is another drama of regret and confession, but Schrader's approach is altogether new, making the movie seem less like the capstone of a tetralogy than like a radical revision of the themes and the styles of its three predecessors.
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NO WAY BACK
The resurgence, in the past decade, of Paul Schrader as one of the most accomplished and acclaimed contemporary movie directors is part of a bigger trend: the self-reinvention of Hollywood auteurs as independent filmmakers.
PRIMORDIAL SORROW
\"All Life Long,\" the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: \"The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,/ All life long crying without avail,/As the water all night long is crying to me.\"
CHOPPED AND STEWED
The other day, at a Nigerian restaurant called Safari, in Houston, Texas, I peeled back the plastic wrap on a ball of fufu, a staple across West Africa.
TOUCH WOOD
What do people do all day? My daughter loves to read Richard Scarry's book of that title, though she generally skips ahead to the hospital pages.
HELLO, HEARTBREAK
Heartbreak cures are as old as time, or at least as old as the Common Era.
ENEMY OF THE STATE
Javier Milei's plan to remake Argentina begins with waging war on the government.
THE CHOOSING ONES
The saga of my Jewish conversion began twenty-five years ago, when I got engaged to my first husband.
OBSCURE FAMILIAL RELATIONS, EXPLAINED FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Children who share only one parent are half siblings. Children who have been bisected via a tragic logging accident are also half siblings, but in a different way.
NOTE TO SELVES
The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities-roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents make occasional appearances.
BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
