Pitchfork, the Early Years

“We were sharecroppers, got up real early and would play for about 15 or 20 minutes, then walk across the street and I’d have a doughnut and he would have his coffee,” Mr. Sonnier recalled in the 88 Miles West interview. “We shared something very special, and then he’d drive me to school.” A young…

Soon after the journalist and historian Valérie Igounet heard about the killing of Samuel Paty, the schoolteacher whose 2020 murder by an Islamist extremist shocked France, she knew she wanted to write a book about him. Paty, who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to students during a class on freedom of expression, was…

Everyone from the academy to streaming services splits cinema into two buckets: movies (comedy, romance, horror, whatever) and documentaries, lumped into one unholy pile. Besides being obviously reductive, the division is false: Nonfiction movies can be comedies or romances or horror or any other genre, and they can create new indescribable genres, too. But American…

Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 22-28. Details and times are subject to change. Monday THE BACHELOR 8 p.m. on ABC. The last few installments of this franchise have been a bit of…

Some casting choices are blindingly obvious. That does not make them lazy; it makes them right. Such is the case with Sutton Foster as the eccentric Princess Winnifred in the Encores! revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” which opened Wednesday at City Center. The central role in this broadly goofy musical was exuberantly, indelibly originated…

Menachem Daum, a filmmaker who co-produced a groundbreaking 1997 documentary that illuminated the cloistered world of America’s Hasidim, died on Jan. 7 in a hospital near his home in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was 77. His death was confirmed by Eva Fogelman, a friend and the author of a book about Christian rescuers of Jews…