Kenneth Lonergan’s second feature, “Margaret,” which received a too-brief and under-publicized release this fall, is one of the year’s cinematic treasures. His first feature, “You Can Count on Me,” from 2000, which I discuss in the clip above, is similarly astonishing. For Lonergan, the cinema is itself an astonishment, with its power to see—and, indeed, to see into—the stuff of daily life. What is, for many filmmakers, a given—the transmission of a story that could happen in life, involving people one could know—is, for Lonergan, a miracle. He reinfuses the most familiar of methods with a new sense of wonder; his moments, luminous fragments of life, also take their place in the world and convey a sense of the splendid and terrifying grandeur of cosmic order, even in their apparently intractable disorder. His two movies offer proof that the source of artistic originality isn’t technical innovation or formal preconception but something that even an atheist might best describe as the soul.
Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.
Our Local Correspondents
Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation
How bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers have turned the restaurant reservation system inside out.
By Adam Iscoe
Profiles
Padma Lakshmi Walks Into a Bar
Since leaving “Top Chef,” Lakshmi has found herself in a period of professional uncertainty. What better time to try standup comedy?
By Helen Rosner
Annals of Gastronomy
A Martini Tour of New York City
My month of vermouth-rinsing and fat-washing.
By Gary Shteyngart
Our Local Correspondents
Donald Trump Is Being Ritually Humiliated in Court
At his criminal trial, the ex-President has to sit there while potential jurors, prosecutors, the judge, witnesses, and even his own lawyers talk about him as a defective, impossible person.
By Eric Lach