Cycles of Transformation at The National Ballet of Canada

Genevieve Penn Nabity and Christopher Gerty in The Four Seasons. Gerty was injured and replaced by Larkin Miller in the performance our critic attended. (Photo: Carolina Kuras.)

Dancers in leaf-green unitards slip into a line at the rear of the stage, their arms raised overhead, wrists connected, fingers fanned into a vessel-like shape—a motif in David Dawson’s The Four Seasons. Subtle yet striking, the gesture suggests an offering, a quiet acknowledgment of something greater than oneself. Dawson, a British choreographer with a distinguished European pedigree, has built his career on crafting works that channel this sense of humility and connection into movement, transforming classical ballet into a language of both physical and spiritual exploration. His choreography demands not only technical precision but also an ability to embody its emotional weight, asking dancers to balance control with a sense of surrender—to the music, to the movement, and to the larger themes it seeks to express.

Meeting the Moment: September 5

Peter Sarsgaard (left) and cast in September 5. (Photo: Paramount.)

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Nick Braccia, to Critics at Large.

Like many movie lovers, I have grown so cynical about contemporary releases that when I stumble upon something great, I’m left staggered. That was exactly my reaction after watching September 5, Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum’s docudrama thriller about the Israeli hostage crisis and the murder of eleven athletes and coaches by the Palestinian militant group Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Despite award noms, nobody’s talking about it—certainly not Paramount, which released it – and that’s a terrible shame, because September 5 is a masterfully calibrated newsroom pressure cooker, engineered with the same craftsmanship the ABC Sports team applied on the movie’s titular day, when seasoned pros accustomed to lower stakes were suddenly called to a higher purpose, broadcasting the unfolding catastrophe to 900 million.

Alone with David Lynch: Notes from a Séance

David Lynch in the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (2016).

A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.

 — “Opening Statement” of “The Archivist,” from The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016), by Mark Frost

Only a few times have I ever felt that being in an audience enhanced my experience of a film. For me art has always been a private thing: “just me and a mirror and my brain,” as The Bee Gees once put it. The obvious benefit of solitary viewing is that you needn’t filter out your neighbors’ responses—contagions of fidgeting whenever action slows or logic separates, gales of laughter at aggressively unfunny jokes. Freed from the bullying influence of consensus, you watch differently; you don’t expect a film to perform for you in the same way. Instead of saying, “Here I am, entertain me,” you adopt the less adversarial, more absorptive role of the engaged bystander. You let the thing develop on its own terms, taking whatever risks it chooses to become whatever it wants to be. Then you judge how well, or if, it did that.