Redux

Several months into Donald Trump’s second term, a friend dragged me to Cabaret. The Broadway revival had begun during the Biden administration, when it felt like, perhaps, the center still might hold. Now the rough beast had returned, like the horror movie villain you think you’ve defeated: ominous music, tiny orange hand catching the door right before you can slam it shut. I was less than eager to spend several hours at a musical about

Courtesy of the Criterion Channel. Joan Micklin Silver’s romantic comedy Crossing Delancey (1988) opens in a dimly lit bookstore on the Upper East Side. “They want to pull us down and make something clean and tall and obscenely profitable arise out of our ashes,” the bookstore’s owner tells a group of literary luminaries assembled for a fundraiser. “But we are here! . . . New York’s last real bookstore will be around for a good